God Entered My Body Like a Body My Same Size
Friday May 25, 2057
Already in late May, the temperatures at noon on the deck of the Wampanoag crest in the seventies. It would be pleasant, if it wasn’t accompanied by the knowledge that June, July, and August will all be much hotter. The ship, not moving an inch from its dock, traps still air on the deck. Below, where Marcus is hiding and eating his lunch, it’s humid and oppressive. But he savors his half hour lunch break as much as he can. It’s too short to go anywhere, except run to the bathroom in the museum, and maybe grab a coffee. So, he’s down in the employee room in the hold, sitting at the uncomfortable card table, sweating, and eating a cheese sandwich on wheat bread.
His phone is resting on the table in front of him, and he’s scrolling through Bryanne’s latest email, which reads like a combination of log entry and grocery list, which is exactly what it is. She doesn’t get cell service while out on her cruises, so she can’t text Marcus, but she can send and receive emails using the Thylacine ’s SATCOM. This lends her missaves a strange level of formality, since she has to go through the hassle of logging into the ship’s computer to send them. She ends up cutting out most of her personal feelings, if she ever considered writing them down in the first place, leaving just facts. She always uses voice-to-text, and so her messages are littered with transcription errors.
Heard whales on the hydro phone while I was on watch this morning turned in that direction but no sighting yet. Weather looking like it will turn bad later might have a storm so we won’t have a chance to see anything even if we’re close but maybe tomorrow. If the rain gets to you please bring the money tree in from off the balcony I don’t want it to be out in the wind. Can you make sure to get bleach when you go to the grocery and cilantro and basmati rice I forgot to get them when I went on Thursday. Thanks love you.
Her frustration bleeds through, even in the perfunctory message. The fact that she hasn’t spotted whales all season is not something she dwells on when she’s at home, at least not as much as Marcus would if he were in her position, but he knows that it’s wearing her down. Their afternoons have become filled with grim silences. Once, Marcus made the mistake of asking her why she has been so quiet, and she responded, “My mother ground into me that if you don’t have something pleasant to say, maybe you shouldn’t say anything.”
It’s not that she’s mad at him— but there’s nothing pleasant to report about the trips. In order to not make the silence quite so oppressive, she talks about how the naturalist on board does her best to field questions and distract passengers, and she says it with a bit of grudging admiration and gratefulness in her tone— glad that she’s not bearing the brunt of it. Grudging praise about a difficult situation is about the most positive she’s able to get.
Marcus understands her frustration, though there’s nothing he can do about it, and no comfort he can offer her without it feeling hollow, distant, like it’s coming from a different world.
Even without being in the direct path of anger from customers who paid to be shown something, it’s still a miserable sense of loss. She took the job on the Thylacine , rather than a larger ship, because she, too, wants to see the whales. She could have been a mate on a ferry, or a fishing trawler, and made at least a bit more money while staying equivalently close to home. But she enjoys chasing them, and especially seeing them. Last year when she came home from the cruises, she always described the sightings to Marcus with a level of detail and enthusiasm that her stories about anything else didn’t usually involve.
The message here could have fit quite neatly in to Amos’s journal, though Amos would have phrased all of his disappointment in a very cheerful way, Marcus thinks. But the spirit is the same.
He’ll have to go to the grocery store once he gets out of here, though he wishes that there were some way other than following Bryanne’s instructions to cheer her up. He’ll install the air conditioner on the window before she gets home. That is a task that she hates, but that he can probably do on his own. Ruefully, he supposes that she won’t comment on it. She’s the kind of person for whom work is simply something to be done; if he doesn’t pry open the stuck window and install the AC, she’ll just do it without complaint, aside from her swearing as she tries to jostle it into the window frame. But maybe, maybe she’ll appreciate the task being done without her.
That resolved, Marcus checks the time again. He can stretch out his lunch break for another six minutes, which is five minutes longer than he should, but the tour that starts exactly at one won’t get to him for a while, and Joe will be too busy to notice that he’s not at his post. He crams the rest of his cheese sandwich in his mouth, drinks iron-tasting and warm water from his half-full lunchbox nalgene, and stares into space.
The idea of going back on deck and giving another tour is making him feel ill, and there’s no amount of saying to himself: “Just four more hours today. That’s only eight half hours. That’s only sixteen quarter hours,” that can lift the weight of there being months and months until the end of the tour season.
Ten minutes pass before Marcus realizes it, and he only jerks up from his seat when he hears someone else coming down into the hold. It’s Joe, and in his haste to get up, Marcus drops his water bottle to the floor, where it rolls away.
“What the hell are you doing down here, Amos?” Joe snaps. He’s in-character, and his goofy drama-teacher demeanor is gone, replaced by the stiff-necked master of the ship. He’d never yell if he was in a classroom, but here, he still thinks he’s on stage, even if they are backstage.
“Sorry, sir,” Marcus says. “Was finishing my lunch.”
“You need to report to your watch on time. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir, sorry, sir. I’m going.”
“A man can be put in irons for missing his watch,” Joe says.
It’s an empty threat, obviously, but it’s nevertheless demeaning to be threatened with. “I’m going, sir,” Marcus says again, and he heads back up on deck before Joe can say anything else.
As he goes, Joe calls after him, “We’ll talk about this later.”
He barely arrives at his position by the time the tour lead gets the group of old women who had reserved that timeslot to his station.
He’s distracted all through the next hour or so, his eyes always sliding around the deck, listening for Joe’s voice and following the movements of the rest of the staff, rather than paying close attention to the monologue he’s supposed to be giving.
Joe doesn’t have the teeth to fire him, nor does he have a spare person to hire to fill Marcus’s place, but that doesn’t mean that getting a talk about being late won’t be unpleasant. It’s just shameful, and it’s the kind of shame that presses on his shoulders and sours every moment at the job until he quits— even long after whoever yells at him forgets his original transgression, Marcus can’t let go of the embarrassment. He’s very familiar with how this goes— it’s a routine cycle in his life at this point.
In every space between one tour group leaving and the next coming up, Marcus leans over the rail, looking out at the spiky masts of a hundred sailboats waiting for sailors, then the ocean, and the horizon above it. It’s not even that he dislikes the job— at least, no more than he would dislike most others. He wanted the job very badly. When he applied, he felt like it would be a step in the right direction for other museum work in the future, or at least gives him time to apply for doctoral programs.
He lets his thoughts drift away from the current moment, shuffling them in that direction. In the moment he’s supposed to be doing anything other than working on emailing prospective advisors, he’s free to think happily about the idea of going back to school. Part of the reason he’s dragged his feet so long is that he’s not entirely sure what to study. His most focused undergraduate work had been about the history of the United Fruit Company in Honduras, specifically about political engagement of workers in the company towns, and the topic still fascinates him, though it’s been years since he was out of school and actively doing any work on the subject. His mother cautioned that he needed to find a way to make his life and applications feel less discontinuous— now that he has a useless master of education degree that he’s hauling around with him like a ball and chain, maybe he should try to leverage that to study the history of education, try to circle that back around to maybe eventually working at an education-focused NGO or something. He feels like he could do that, and he’d probably enjoy it, but it would be starting from nothing, and it’s a vague dream, and one that— even to him— feels paternalistic. He got out of teaching for more than one reason.
He’s so distracted thinking about this that he doesn’t even notice that, creeping forward through the queue of people at the dock, is a group of students all wearing tee shirts from the school where he used to work. It’s a small group that boards the ship, one tour’s worth— half of a classroom. The other half is likely still inside the museum, or perhaps this is some kind of club. Regardless, Marcus doesn’t see them until they’re right on top of him, the tour lead snapping him out of his reverie as he approaches, calling out, “Amos, have you met these young fellows yet?”
Marcus jerks around from where he had been staring out at the water, and smiles at the group, “Well, no I haven’t, hello—”
“Mr. Ashton?” one of the kids says, first surprised and then with increasing glee. Not because any of the students— all of whom Marcus now recognizes— liked him particularly, but because the idea of meeting someone where they’re not supposed to be creates opportunities for trouble. He had never been good at classroom management. All of the kids in this group had been his students last year, seventh graders then, eighth graders now.
“I’m afraid you’ve mistaken me for someone else,” Marcus says, trying to launch immediately into his monologue. “I’m Amos Cudjoe, my friend, and I’m the harpooner on this ship. A harpooner is also sometimes called a boatsteerer, because we do both jobs. Now, you might think that the boat I’m referring to is this one” —He gestures around— “but I’m actually talking about these little boats right here.”
“You totally are Mr. Ashton,” one of the girls says. He searches his name for her memory— soccer player, always bleaches just the bangs of her hair— Genesis, that’s it.
“Who is this Mr. Ashton?” Marcus asks, deciding that it’s better to play along than let the situation get out of hand. He learned the hard way that trying to talk over students who are not listening is a road to losing control completely— better to engage and keep their attention on him.
“Brooooo,” one of the boys (whose name Marcus has completely forgotten) says. “Everyone thought you got fired.”
“I thought you got married,” one of the girls says. That’s Amy, with the thick glasses.
“No,” Marcus says, reaching back to his memory of Amos’s journal. “I’m afraid I haven’t been able to get married yet. I’d like to!”
“Ooooh,” Amy says. “Did you get dumped?” She’s the gossipy kind of sympathetic, but Marcus leaps on the question, and leans on the rail of the ship, really getting into character and pivoting.
“Well, no, not as such. It’s just I had no money to get married with. A woman, and she is the most beautiful woman, and respectable and would be a good wife, she needs a man who can provide for her. And so I’ve gone whaling to make my way in the world, and bring back some pay at the end of the voyage. But four years— that’s a long time.”
“Did she cheat on you?” It’s unclear if she’s gotten absorbed enough in Marcus’s play to ask about Amos’s life.
“I certainly hope not,” Marcus says. “I trust her. But, as I said, four years is an awful long time. This is my second voyage, and by the end of it, well, I’ll have spent eight years out whaling, that’s almost a whole third of my life. And it’s hard to get mail from people you miss back at home. They don’t always know where to send it off to.”
Even the surprise of encountering a former teacher is not enough to keep the kids’ interest. A handful of the boys have wandered away from the group, towards the trypots on the deck, and the teacher (who Marcus doesn’t know) is trying to corral them back. “Get down from there!”
“They’re not doing any harm,” Marcus says, and waves a hand at her to let the boys continue their investigations. He walks over himself and leading the rest of the more obedient kids behind him.
Two of the trypots are encased in the brick tryworks, but there’s a third out on the deck for demonstration purposes, the huge cast-iron vessel sitting there propped up on wooden chocks for the tourists to investigate. Marcus always finds it funny when parents ask if they can take photos with it, holding up their squirming toddler over the pot as though they’re going to put the baby in a soup. These kids are all too big for that, but exactly the right size to lean on it and bang their fists on it, yelling down into it.
“You like the trypots?” Marcus asks. “We’ve just had a poor soul in trouble who was late for his watch scrape and scrub them out— they’re as clean as they’re ever going to get. We could do our laundry in ‘em now. But usually they’re so full of caked on grease that you’d never want to touch them.”
Those of the kids who aren’t trying to climb inside the pot seem mostly bored. The teacher asks, “What are these for?”
“We use them for boiling down the whales once we’ve caught them,” he says. “It’s my least favorite part of the journey, I’m afraid. It’s hard and hot and messy work, chopping the whales up into pieces. But it’s the most essential for making money. It used to be— in the old days— ships wouldn’t have a tryworks like this on board. They’d catch a whale and haul him all the way back to shore, and process it down there to get the oil. But all the whales have gotten too clever for us, and they live far away from shore now, out in the Pacific, or up in the Arctic. We don’t have time after catching them to process them on shore— so we have to cut them up and boil them down right on board.”
He points to the chains and hooks further forward. “When we’re cutting up the whale, we use our windlass— the big winch and chain— to haul the big sheets of blubber up onto the deck, and then it’s our job to cut them down small enough to fit in the pot and boil off easy.”
The boys playing with the pot aren’t paying any attention, and one of the other kids leans over to his friend and says, “I’m gonna chop you up and boil you. Think you’ll melt?” And pinches the other boy’s arm, hard enough to make him jump.
“Stop it, fucker.”
“Language!” the teacher says, very ineffectually.
Before this can cause more of a problem, Marcus looks around to see who’s listening, and his eyes land on the girl Genesis again. He asks her, “Have you ever cooked bacon?”
“Seen my dad do it,” she says.
“It’s just like that, what we do,” he says. “We get the pieces of blubber so hot that the oil melts and renders right out of them. But when you cook bacon, what you want is the meat left over. We want the oil that comes out, so we can put it in barrels and sell it for lanterns and candles and a million other things.” He pauses. “Now, when you’re cooking bacon, you eat the meat. What do you think we do with the meat that’s left, once we’ve taken all the oil out?”
“You eat the whales?” one of the boys asks, finally interested. “What do they taste like?”
“Oh, no, I’ve never eaten a whale,” Marcus says. “I’m told it’s not pleasant.” He reaches for the big metal forks leaning against the tryworks, and grabs one— the blubber pike.
“Can I hold it?” one of the boys asks.
“Of course,” Marcus says. He hands over the pike, and, to forestall any possibility that the boy might brandish it, he says, “See how far down you can stick it in the trypot. Now oil isn’t as heavy as water, but it’s still hard to stir.”
The kid does stick the pike down into the pot, and is interested enough in this, at least until he bangs it against the side like a gong, that there’s no trouble.
“We fish the pieces out with this, all the scraps, and then, well, the whale is a very generous animal. He gives us everything we need to process him down. Once we’ve gotten the oil out, we feed the fire with the scraps. They burn real hot, just also real smoky. You can always spot a whaler out on the ocean from the trail of smoke she leaves in the sky. And you can smell her from miles off, if the wind is right.”
All of this seems to be making the girls ill, and the boys are no longer interested in the pots, so Marcus gives up on this. “Well, I’ve been talking about this all backwards, anyway. Before you can boil a whale down and get his oil out, you need to catch him. And boiling a whale is everybody’s job, but catching him— well, I’m a harpooner. I like to think that I have the most important job.”
“Mr. Ashton, can I go to the bathroom?” one of the kids asks. Jackson, that’s his name.
“I really am afraid you’re confusing me for someone else.”
“Wait until the end of the tour,” the teacher says.
“It’s an emergency!”
“Is there a bathroom on this boat?”
The tour lead spares Marcus from any further breaks in character and says, “Not a working one. You’ll have to go back to the museum.”
“Are you sure you can’t wait?” the teacher asks.
“I’m sure!” Jackson says, though he glances back with a smile as the teacher leads him away, surrendering the rest of the tour group to Marcus and the tour lead alone. Marcus, who is leading the rest of the group over to the boat resting on the deck, doesn’t process this fact. The kids cluster around him; the boat is at least of some interest, and since it’s fairly stable on its chocks on the deck, Marcus lets a handful of kids jostle for seats inside it.
“One thing about us whalemen is that no other kind of merchant sailor could ever do our job. And not navy sailors either. A sailor on a different kind of ship, once he’s used to it, he begins to think that the ship—” and he gestures around “— is the whole world, and the idea of stepping out of her safety is inconceivable to him. On any other kind of ship, a boat like this is a last resort— you’d never lower it and get in unless your ship was sinking. But for a whaleman, this is how we catch a whale. We’re happy as clams to be rowing around, or fitting up our sail here on the chase. Look at how long our oars are. Go ahead, you can pick them up.”
The boys immediately do pick up the oars, spending a moment trying to figure out the best grip on them. It’s unergonomic, since only half of the oars— the ones opposite from where people walk back and forth across the deck— are in place. They’re locked down too, to limit the range of motion and to stop passers-by from getting whacked.
“I’ve heard from plenty of men that there are some whalemen who love the boats so much more than they love whatever their ship is, they’ll be willing to steal one in the middle of the Pacific ocean, hundreds of miles from even the tiniest island and safety, and start rowing wherever they think they can get. I wish them all good luck with that! You can see how heavy those oars are, can’t you? Now imagine you’re rowing all day and chasing a whale. It sometimes does take all day! If we’ve spotted whales, we usually don’t come back to the ship until we’ve caught one, or it’s too dark to see anything. Sometimes we can use the sail on the approach, but once we get close, we have to row. Put your back into it! You’re rowing air, not water! Let me see it move!”
Some of the boys are hauling on the oars, having now figured out how to swing them as far as the range of motion allows.
“Mr. Ashton, you shoulda taught gym instead,” one of the boys says.
“I’m afraid I am not that man!” Marcus says. “I’m a harpooner on the good ship Wampanoag .”
“Why do you work here, anyway?” Genesis asks. She’s leaning on the side of the boat now, looking up at the empty masts and the scarecrow, her long fingernails digging into the flaking paint on the side of the boat. The boy sitting at the position next to where she’s leaning pokes the small of her back, and she slaps at him without looking, then moves away towards the bow of the boat, going to fiddle with the ropes and investigate the knot around the loggerhead.
“I need the money,” Marcus says, which is true for both him and Amos, and it makes the kids laugh. “And I’m good at this job.”
“Proooove it,” one of the boys says.
“Prove it?” Marcus asks. The harpoon is not-quite-hidden beneath the boat, kept there to stop kids from grabbing it before Marcus can show it, and he reaches down and picks it up. “I’m the best harpooner on this ship.”
The sight of the weapon is the only thing that gets the kids’ attention, and their eyes snap towards the sharp iron on its long and heavy wooden pole. Marcus holds it out and lets the first boy in the boat hold it. He’s so surprised by its weight that he doesn’t think to resist when Marcus takes the harpoon away again.
He climbs into the front of the boat, all the while explaining the pieces of the Temple toggle iron tip, who invented it, and how the rope is fastened and how the whale is darted. The details don’t enthrall them, but he keeps talking until the words peter out, and he’s left standing at the front of the boat, holding the harpoon in his hands.
It feels deeply stupid to talk about it— it’s the falseness coming back in full force, the play acting that isn’t even acting. No actor in a play would deliver such a factual monologue— he’s still only a history teacher, dressed in a costume. He can’t even blame the kids for poking at it; the feeling is too close to the surface, not even under the skin, just under the clothes.
“You look good up there Mr. Ashton,” one of the girls says, giggling. “I wish you didn’t quit. Or get fired.”
“I’m not that man!” Marcus says. “I’m a harpooner!”
“Yeah? And whaddya do with that thing?”
Marcus ignores the question, standing in the front of the boat. He can’t look at the kids. A heat is rising to his cheeks, and he tries to stifle the embarrassment by closing his eyes. The boat rocks on its chocks as the boys continue trying to haul the oars free and hit each other with them, but Marcus sinks down into his own world. Through the darkness of his eyelids, he can still see the sun, a bright spot rendering the world as nothing more than black ocean and white sky. He hoists the harpoon. Despite everything, it feels natural in his hands.
“There’s the whale,” he says, and points, imagining it somewhere off the bow. “It’s not too far. Now it’s my job to get it. I have to dart it, throw the harpoon hard enough that the tip goes right through its skin and digs in enough to get a good grip. It’s a hard job.”
“Do it, Mr. Ashton!” one of the boys yells.
He’s happy to comply. He always mimes a throw during this part of the tour, raising the harpoon and pretending to spear the whale. He hoists the harpoon up like he’s going to throw it. Usually, he lets it slip a foot or so in his hand down the long wooden pole before he catches it again, but as the kids whoop and holler, rocking the tiny whaleboat back and forth on its chocks, he feels— for just a second— like he’s out on the open ocean with it, and he sees the whale rising up in front of him.
Before he’s aware of what he’s doing, he darts the harpoon, surprising strength in his arm, and it slips through his hand. He’s lost in the fantasy, eyes closed, for a fraction of a second too long, and by the time he returns to his senses, the pole of the harpoon is sailing through the air, and the rope that’s supposed to contain it is slipping out of his fingers. He snaps his eyes open, and the kids shriek in horror and delight as the harpoon flies away, off the side of the ship.
The boys en masse clamber out the boat, making it wobble on its chocks. Marcus sits down on the oarsman’s thwart heavily, clutching the side for stability. He’s as unsteady as the boat is, and the kids flashing back and forth before his eyes seem like strangers, their voices unnerving him. He knows who they are, but he can’t remember their names anymore— he’s not even sure he remembers his own. The boys lean over the side of the ship, hollering.
The yelling has attracted Joe, who leaves his own tour with the tour lead and comes over to investigate.
“Man, you got it!” one boy says. “Like a whale!”
“I guess those things are sharp.”
“They’re not sharp, just heavy. That’s physics.”
Joe arrives, and, without saying anything, leans over the side to see what’s happened. When he unbends and turns towards Marcus, his expression is unreadable, and he beckons Marcus over with one silent gesture. Marcus wobbles when he stands, and when he stumbles over towards the side of the ship and looks down, he thinks he’s going to be sick over the side.
The harpoon that left Marcus’s hand flew true almost four fathoms, given extra distance by the height of the deck, and then turned downwards, impaling itself directly upright in the deck of the closest sailboat. It pierced through the panels of the deck, and is now stuck in deep.
The general chaos that his accidental spearfishing caused means that both Joe and Marcus pass off their sections of the tour to the already-overburdened tour leads for the last few hours of the day. Nobody is happy about this, least of all Joe and Marcus. Additionally, nobody seems to know what to do with him, or about him. He’s sent into the museum proper, and he sits in the lobby, beneath the whale skeletons strung up above. He thinks he’s waiting for someone to tell him to fill out an incident report form, or maybe make a police statement for the insurance, but after Joe heads into the staff areas of the museum, no one tells him what to do, and he just sits.
This late in the day, the few guests passing through the lobby are on their way out, and so they don’t look at Marcus in his costume, scrunching his hat in his hands as he stares up at the huge bones overhead. The few kids who come by and try to climb into the open mouth of the floor display (a fiberglass model of a right whale feeding) ignore him. He should, since he’s staff, at least for the moment, tell the kids to knock it off, but he can’t bring himself to. He’s feeling too much like a scolded child himself, even though no one has said a thing to him yet.
The room smells like whale oil— even after many years of being on display, the skeletons still drip with it, and so there’s plastic shields beneath the hanging displays, catching the thick brown liquid that oozes out of the pores in the bones. There’s a sign on the wall explaining this, saying that the newest skeleton might not stop letting out oil for another twenty years. Funny how long you can keep bleeding after you’re dead, Marcus thinks.
He didn’t know what the smell in the room was was when he first visited the museum, thinking the dark scent was mold and rising damp from times the streets flooded, but after smelling a bottle of it, collected from the drippings and presented during their tours, he thinks he’d be able to recognize it anywhere. It fills his nose completely. The big glass windows in the lobby let him see out onto the cobblestone streets of the city, but the glare on the windows makes it so his own superimposed reflection is much more visible than the old buildings. Amos, with his hat in his hands, and the smell of whale oil. The city probably looks very different, but the smell, here, at least, would be very familiar to a man from a hundred years ago.
He wonders how much Amos actually looked like him. There’s no photographs, of course, so he’s free to imagine that their reflections are identical. They both have Indian grandmothers, of a sort, though Marcus’s is from New Delhi via London, and Amos’s was probably Narragansett. It was a funny sticking point when he took the job, complaining to Bryanne about feeling insincere portraying the Black American experience, when both his parents were first-generation immigrants. Probably nobody looking at him notices or cares about the difference— the visual checks out.
He’s disturbed by the way his own reflection is looking at him (a squinting, studying contemplation), so he goes back to looking at the whales above. Funny how they’re displayed up high, when the experience of seeing a living whale is one of seeing it in parts, from the surface of the water and looking down. He could go up to the second floor balcony to see them closer, but even that would only be looking at them eye-to-eye. He’s not an expert on museum design, but this has to be intentional— the physical awe of craning your neck to look up, and the delicacy of the skeletons, no matter how large they are, obscuring the terror of flesh-and-blood at scale. The dead whales, silent and angelic overhead, communicate nothing of the visceral feeling of standing in the prow of a whaleboat, harpoon in hand.
But Marcus can’t know what that feeling is, he’s imagining what that must feel like, and all he has to aid in his imagining is the skeletons. Even though it feels very real (when he tightens his hands and squishes his hat, he can still feel the wood of the harpoon), there’s no way he could understand it fully. He tries to shove away the odd sense of loss and think about something else. He wonders, if all Amos saw of whales was the leviathan, and then the leviathan as a mass of blood and flesh and oil, could he ever picture these clean skeletons above? Probably not.
Still, the oil drips from them.
The museum is about to close for the night when Joe finally emerges from the staff offices. He seems surprised to find Marcus there, but he was the one who told Marcus to wait, so there’s no reason for him to be startled. Joe, too, is still in costume, his day-clothes still in the hold of the Wampanoag .
Even though he’s in costume, he has put his acting persona far behind him, and he’s now slumping with tiredness as he holds the heavy front door open so that Marcus can follow him onto the street. It’s a bit of a walk from the museum to the pier, and the hot early-summer air paradoxically makes them both shiver as they leave the air conditioned museum.
“I’m not firing you,” Joe says. “I’ll say that right out.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“The museum and the trust have good accident insurance, and nobody got hurt. It’ll all be fine.”
Marcus nods.
“But I don’t think I have to tell you that you could have really hurt someone,” Joe says. It’s the patronizing tone that makes Marcus grind his teeth, even though it was his mistake.
“I know,” he replies. “I am really sorry.”
“And I’m not going to ask you what you were thinking. Accidents happen. Mistakes happen.” He pauses. “I’m a big believer in second chances.”
“It won’t happen again, sir.”
“Let’s put together a plan to make sure of that, okay? What are the steps we need to take? Let’s brainstorm, right?”
Marcus is silent for a little too long.
“I fought for you, you know, in there,” Joe says. “I think you’re a good employee, and a good guy, and I wanted to keep you around. Don’t prove me wrong, Marcus.”
He tries to imagine himself in Joe’s position, and can’t. It was one of the things he was worst at as a teacher— sitting kids down and trying to cajole them through the guilt of not having done their homework, or acting up, or whatever the stupid infraction du jour had been. Joe, retired from decades of teaching drama, seems to be an expert at this. Marcus had hated the sliminess of it, looking down, and he hates being on the receiving end of it now. Shame is very effective at making something inside of him squirm, but the shape it wants to squirm into is hatred. They’re both adults— it’s demeaning to be treated like a child. He stuffs the feeling down. He should be grateful he’s not being fired. Like Amos, he needs the job, and he needs the money.
“I won’t stand in the boat to demonstrate the harpoon,” Marcus says mechanically. “It was rocking on the chocks when the kids were rowing, and I lost my balance.”
“It could have happened to anyone,” Joe says, false enthusiasm in his tone for Marcus offering a solution. “That’s good. That’s a step in the right direction. And?”
“And I’ll set my alarm earlier so that I’m not late.”
“Right! Good!”
As they come into sight of the ship, Marcus lifts his head and looks at the scarecrow at the top of the mast, and at the skeletal clouds that drift by.