Broken Down Lovers in the City of Oil
Friday June 8, 2057
In early June, the temperature tips upwards to the mid eighties, a miserable film of hot, salty air clinging to everything. School tours are more numerous now on the Wampanoag , with the end of the academic year approaching. They arrive on their yellow buses, the kids sticking their faces out the windows like panting dogs, shaggy heads trying to catch any breeze they can find as the busses slow to a crawl, trying to wind their way through New Bedford’s historic cobbled streets.
During the day, it’s raucous, but the kids tend to be gone by one or two in the afternoon, and so on weekdays, the latter part slides by in a quiet haze, where noises either echo or stick, and the asphalt shingle roofs of buildings begin to shimmer with collected heat.
Marcus, for his own part, has taken to climbing.
They’re not supposed to scale the masts, go up to the lookout where they left their scarecrow to watch for whales. But Marcus does, whenever he gets the chance. Joe, who saw him do it once, doesn’t yell at him, but if anyone from the museum proper saw, any of the administration, they’d have his head. It’s the kind of thing that all the staff signed an agreement not to do— do nothing dangerous, do nothing on the ship that is specific to it being a ship. They’re not sailors, after all. They’re theater kids with seasonal jobs, most of them. But Marcus has discovered that he likes the height.
It’s marginally cooler aloft. The sail-less spars of the mast don’t block the wind, and up high there’s more of a breeze than at deck level, coming in off the ocean. And standing up there, he can see the boats coming and going in one direction, and then New Bedford’s roofs in the other. He doesn’t look down at his feet; it’s dizzying to see the deck below him.
Marcus doesn’t scale the mast until after everyone else has left for the day, and it’s best to do it when the evening’s shadows are swallowing the deck in darkness, so that none of the unobtrusive security cameras can catch a glimpse of him.
The first time he did it, it was on a whim, one Monday night. He wanted to see the Thylacine come into port, to watch her distinctive sail tower enter the mouth of the river. He figured that would be the way to time himself getting to meet Bryanne at the dock.
The first time he climbed, he was very careful about it, hand over hand, feeling and fumbling his way slowly upwards, making sure his whole weight was held at three other points before he moved any limb. But when he reached the top, squeezed himself into the hoop next to the scarecrow tied upright to the mast like Odysseus, he felt elated, and like it had been easy, natural.
So, the next time, he climbed faster.
After a few repetitions of this exercise, he can be at the top of the mast so quickly that he doesn’t have time to appreciate the sensations of the climb itself: the joy of motion and the scrape of the ropes and wood beneath his hands. He wishes, once he reaches the top, that he could climb forever, a Jacob’s ladder stretching up to heaven. The exertion of climbing feels very real, and the danger of being up high with nothing to hold him and stop him from falling is real, too.
Of course, on a real ship, no one would have been watching for whales after the sun went down, so Marcus is still playing a game, and the falseness sets in when he sees the last of the sun slip down behind the buildings of town, civil twilight filling the sky with a strange, pinky grey. Nevertheless, he likes it up there, and so he stays long after work is finished and he should have gone home. Bryanne is out at sea today, so there’s no one at home waiting for him, only tedious tasks and the endless quarreling of their downstairs neighbors and a phone call to his mother that he really should make, but won’t.
It’s just him and the scarecrow up there.
“Evening, Tobey,” Marcus says to the scarecrow as he squeezes into the hoop. “Seen any whales yet?”
The scarecrow doesn’t have a name, at least not one that the museum has given him, but Marcus picks the name of one of Amos’s friends on the ship for him. It’s company up there, or at least the simulacrum of it.
The scarecrow is made of brown oilcloth, stuffed overfull, probably with cotton-poly batting. The limbs are stubs, the pants and shirt thrift-store finds that don’t even match Marcus’s real costume. But no one would notice from down below that the denim pants are modern, and the loose white blouse is definitely a woman’s cut. The clothes are already ragged from months out in the weather; only the body of the scarecrow remains whole. A line of cord ties the scarecrow to the mast, fastening his arms to the hoop, pinching them down so that it looks like hands holding the metal, and cinching his waist tight to keep him standing upright.
“You alright up here?” Marcus slips his finger through the ropes around the scarecrow’s waist. “Not too tight, is it?”
Tobey is a bad choice of name for the scarecrow, Marcus thinks, recalling the incident vividly described in Amos’s journal— Tobey being chained to the mast on deck and left outside for a week. But this is just ropes, not irons, and also just a scarecrow, not even one with a face. He doesn’t have any reason to speak to it, and certainly shouldn’t expect an answer.
He shifts into his own safe position up there, facing away from the scarecrow, its slight stature a hint in his peripheral vision. The vague indication of another person’s presence feels much more real than looking at it directly.
“You’re going to be annoyed at me for talking about my girl,” Marcus says to Tobey. “Feel free to tell me to be quiet.”
The scarecrow, of course, is not capable of saying anything.
“I think she’s getting a little tired of me,” Marcus says. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m being paranoid.”
The wind rustles past them both, a fresh breeze. Out somewhere further down the Acushnet, a horn sounds across the open water.
“I know you don’t want to hear it. It’s just— okay, we’ve been dating for three years, going on four, living together for more than two. There’s a part of me that wants to ask her to marry me— and I know she won’t say yes, so I’m not going to ask.” He quickly clarifies. “It’s not that she doesn’t love me— at the very least she likes me, and we get along great, and I could see myself doing this with her for the rest of my life for sure— but I don’t think she believes in it as an institution or whatever. I get it.”
He pretends that Tobey is annoyed at him for talking, but the scarecrow has no choice but to listen.
“And we both keep saying to each other, well, I’m going to go to grad school, and she’s going to take a job on a bigger ship, and then, what? We won’t see each other. She’ll be gone for months at a time, and I’ll be— I don’t know.” He can’t imagine the future very well; he’s beginning to have his doubts that he will actually make it into a graduate program, among other things.
He leans on the hoop, feeling it press into his stomach and bend under his weight. It’s dizzying to imagine the ship swaying underneath him. Though they’re safe and sound at dock, he can conjure up the sensation when he closes his eyes: the way that a slight angular tilt of the ship at deck level means a wild sway of the mast this high up. When he was a kid, he used to be able to imagine the whole world of his bedroom swaying and rocking around himself at night: a dreamy, floating sensation unconnected to any real-world physics that only the insomniac mind of a ten year old could focus on and make real. The feeling is the same now.
“She was looking for new jobs last week,” Marcus says. “She was on the phone with her uncle, who said he knew somebody who could get her a job on a tanker ship. Oil, I guess, though that’s kinda a dying industry, so maybe she’d be better off with something else. And then I saw her looking on job boards, and I asked her if she saw any positions that she’d want. She just got annoyed with me. I don’t know if that’s because she’s annoyed with me or if it’s because she doesn’t really want to—”
Marcus glances behind himself at Tobey. “Like, what’s going to happen to us?”
He sighs and turns back out towards the water. He knows what’s going to happen, and he doesn’t need the scarecrow to tell him anything. The only way anybody stays sane is by pretending there’s something permanent in the world, but there isn’t. There really isn’t.
He thinks about the ways that Amos’s journal cleanly demarcates the passage of time. 1st day. 100th day. 200th. The numbers count up, but really it’s a countdown, a figuring of how long remains until the end of the voyage— four years.
“Four years is a long time,” Marcus says. “I’m sure you know that better than I do. If that’s all I get, maybe I’d better just appreciate it while I’ve got it.”
It’s almost funny how little Amos’s journal says about the woman who is— was— perhaps waiting for him back home. She’s the empty you , the audience who doesn’t need Amos to hold a mirror of description up to her. It’s a strange sensation to read the journal, to be addressed directly. He knows nothing about you . But he knows a lot about Amos now, and can’t help but feel more closely tied to the writer than the reader.
“You’d better tell me, Tobey,” Marcus says. “You know how it ends. Is she waiting for me, when the voyage is over?”
A police siren wails in the distance, the yelps telling cars to get out of the way, and then falls silent. Marcus glances in that direction, and sees the blue and red lights dance through some distant street, down in front of one of the bars in this part of town.
“You must think it’s ridiculous that I haven’t finished reading the journal yet,” Marcus says. “I could know the answer if I wanted it. But I’ve got a whole summer to get through, and, I don’t know, I kinda like your company there in the book. I don’t want to run through it too fast. I’m rationing the pages.”
He’s rationing his time up on the mast, too. He should bike home soon, but he doesn’t want to go back. Even though the scarecrow is only a doll, it’s less lonely with his company than it is in his empty apartment. He looks out at the water and wonders what Bryanne is up to. She has the 4-8 watch, so she’s off duty now. She’ll get her dinner, and then go to sleep, most likely.
He makes the mistake of glancing down below himself, at the sailboats docked next to the Wampanoag , and sees the Whole Wide World . Although the whole area is now cloaked in darkness, he can barely make out the harpoon that’s still sticking up out of the deck. His lip curls in an involuntary expression of annoyance, and then he looks away. The chagrin he once felt about accidentally spearing the sailboat has fallen away, and now the only feeling he can muster in himself towards the woman who owns it is a kind of anxious disdain.
He doesn’t mention that to Tobey, though, and stares into the darkness. Time is slippery, without any way to measure it. But whalemen get used to these long watches aloft— they find something to think about, or some way to avoid thinking.
Down below, there is shouting and laughter in the street. It sounds like a group of teenage boys, maybe college aged, who are running down the pier. Marcus, glancing down, sees their long shadows as they chase each other around. They look unburdened; he’s jealous.
They’re uncaring or adventurous enough to leap down onto the quiescent decks of the sailboats. When one of them hops onto the Whole Wide World , Marcus can’t help but be entertained to see them try the hatch. It’s locked, of course, so the little pirate leaps to the next sailboat over.
One of them comes up to the Wampanoag . He ducks beneath the ropes that form the lines for the tour, and tromps up the gangway, which the museum staff leave in position at night because it’s too annoying to move. At the top, before the easily leapt-over gate, he motions urgently to his friends, and looks around to be sure they’re the only ones in sight.
His friends, who have been chasing each other across the decks of the other nearby sailboats, see the summons and jackrabbit themselves back towards the tall ship. The boy at the top of the gangway easily hops the gate, and lands with a thump on the Wampanoag ’s wooden deck. The rest of them follow.
The doors to the interior of the Wampanoag are not locked, mainly because Marcus hasn’t gotten around to locking them yet; the keys are down in the staff room in the hold. Whoever’s the last one out for the night puts them in a combination lockbox in the deckhouse when they leave.
The intruders are stealthier, now that they’re on the one ship and not leaping from deck to deck. They actually seem to be curious about the strange tall ship, so different from all the little sailboats. One of them sticks his head into the trypots, another tries to clamber up into the L boat hanging from the davits. All their props are put away for the day, inside the main cabin, so that stops any of them from grabbing a harpoon or a lance or a knife right away, but they discover that the doors are open, and one of them creeps down inside the ship, shining his phone flashlight on the way.
Marcus isn’t sure what to do— he feels the same momentary paralyzation he always felt when his students began to misbehave. Someone might know how to diffuse a situation before it got out of hand, but that person was not him.
During the last semester that he taught, no amount of pleading or threatening or ignoring could stop trouble. When a yelling argument arose, as it often did, he tried speaking calmly for a moment too long, or he thinks he did— he can’t quite remember. The scene in his memory always cuts directly to the two students leaping at each other, knocking desks out of the way, and the pool of blood at his feet when one breaks the other’s nose. The feeling of helplessness overwhelmed him then, and it still rattles around his mind whenever he thinks about it.
Now, he’s watching the scene from above, a silent observer, and the boys are completely ignorant of his presence. If they happen to glance up, they’ll probably assume they’re seeing two scarecrows on lookout.
The boy who went down below emerges with a harpoon, and says, loudly enough that Marcus can hear his voice drift up, “There’s tons of weird shit in there. Kinda creepy, though.”
Two of the other boys go down, while the one with the harpoon goes over to the one reclining in the L boat on the davits, and starts to mime stabbing at him. The boat sways and rocks.
Marcus, now that none of them are facing the mast, slips down from the lookout, and carefully clambers down to the deck. He moves as quietly as he can. In the shadows, neither of the two boys on deck see him as he creeps down the main hatch, where he saw the other two head inside. What the museum staff would tell him to do is call the cops, but he’s not going to call the cops on a bunch of kids.
He’s very familiar with the bark; he could navigate it with his eyes closed, which is good because there’s no light below. He can hear the boys in the master’s quarters, fooling around with some of the props.
“What the fuck is this shit?” one of them asks. There’s sounds of thumping and laughter. “I think I broke it, chat.”
“Man, give it to me— hey!” More laughter. Marcus isn’t sure what’s being destroyed, but he hopes it’s nothing too important. The master’s rooms are the nicest on the ship, so there’s plenty in there to break, even if all the instruments and tools are replicas.
It’s very stupid for him to intervene, but it is his responsibility, since he was careless enough to not lock up, and then spend so long up on the mast. Marcus enters the master’s rooms, and then stands at the door. He’s still wearing his costume.
It takes a long second for either of the boys to notice him, even though his footsteps were clearly audible. One of them is sitting on the couch, the other is shining his phone’s flashlight around at the writing desk and peeking his head into the bedroom. On the floor is the remains of their demonstration whalebone, the three foot tall piece of baleen that they have to show during tours. Marcus usually thinks of it as quite sturdy, but he’s also never had two teenagers try their hardest to rip it apart before. It’s now in two pieces, with a few smaller of the baleen plates fallen to the floor.
The one on the couch sees Marcus first, and scrambles to his feet. “Who the fuck—”
The boys are just high schoolers— he can see it now in the round-eyed youthfulness of their faces, and hear it the way the boy’s voice cracks on the question. Marcus, calm but taller than the both of them, and looming out of the shadows, asks, “What are you doing on my ship?”
He knows exactly the impression he’s creating, of a ghost swimming out of the gloom, and it has the intended effect. It has a strange effect on him, too. He mentally asks Amos what he would do— Amos would probably do the same thing. He never wants to get anyone in trouble, always aiding and abetting various minor infractions, mainly for the sake of keeping the peace. He can hear Amos in his own voice, and see him in the mirror hung on the wall, the boys flashlights training onto his own face and making him squint. As he raises his hand over his eyes to block the light, he takes a few steps forward towards the boys, moving in a heavy, deliberately slow, plodding way.
The boys scramble backwards, looking around themselves in a panic as Marcus the ghost approaches. The one who had been in the bedroom notices the open door of the master’s cabinet, full of both curiosities and tools. Among the books and reproduction scrimshaw, there’s the master’s gun: a Colt revolver. He grabs for the gun, knocking pens and maps to the floor as he does, and points it at Marcus.
On a practical level, he knows that the gun doesn’t work. It’s a reproduction for looks only. There isn’t even a firing mechanism. But it looks real enough, and in the mirror on the wall, Amos flinches.
But Amos doesn’t have to worry, Marcus thinks. He says, “You can’t hurt me with that— I’m already dead.” — And the gun doesn’t work.
The boy holding it yelps in fear and tries the trigger and gets the expected result: nothing happens. He throws the gun at Marcus’s head, but he dodges to the side fast enough that it sails past his shoulder and thumps into the wall.
But he’s out of the doorway now, and the boys make a break for it and run past him, stumbling and tripping over each other in the dark. The way they brush past him, the breeze from their movement the only thing that touches him, and he does feel as insubstantial as a ghost. He, too, lurches forward and leans himself on the writing desk, solid and real beneath his hands.
As they go, Marcus can hear them yelling: “This place is ultra haunted, chat! I told you!”
He thinks the moonlight and streetlights outside would ruin the illusion, so Marcus doesn’t follow them, instead listening to the pounding of their feet overhead as they hop the gate and run down the gangway again.
He’s now in darkness, aside from the tiny sliver of moonlight that makes its way through the deck prism in the ceiling. He can see enough to pick up the broken pieces of whalebone. He figures what’s the harm— he’s never going to get another chance— and so he slips one of the broken pieces into his pocket, and does his best to clean up the rest of the mess the boys left.
On the deck, he finds the harpoon tangled in the line holding up the boat on the davits, and he gently pulls it out. The boys are long gone, though one of them left an open bag of potato chips in the bottom of the boat. He can hear them calling to each other as they run.
“We both fucking saw it! A real-ass ghost!”
“An ass ghost? You looking at his ass? Chat, this man was looking at a ghost’s ass!”
“Couldn’t even see his ass, man!”
On Saturday, when Joe discovers the ruin of the baleen, Marcus confesses that he might have forgotten to lock up when he left for the night. He’d rather admit to that than describe to Joe the entire saga. Joe is deeply annoyed; it’s yet another straw on the camel’s back for Marcus’s continued employment, but his actual tours keep going well, and he’s no longer late in the mornings, so Joe lets it slide.
The weekend, as it usually is, is lonely and boring for Marcus as soon as the day is done. He decides not to press his luck on the mast, at least for a few days, so he bikes home right after work and intends to spend the evening on the sagging apartment balcony instead.
At home, he rediscovers the piece of whalebone that he picked up from the floor of the ship and dropped on his peeling laminate kitchen counter before he went to bed the night before. The baleen piece is slender, about two inches wide and an eighth of an inch thick, dark brown, almost black. It’s vaguely triangular in shape, about nine inches long in its longer dimension.
He’s held baleen plenty of times before— he regularly helps clean up the ship after tours are over for the day, and puts the props back in their proper homes— but he’s never gotten a chance to play with a piece like this. He takes it with him out to the balcony, and when he sits on their disintegrating lawn chairs, he tests its flexibility and strength. A piece like this would have been scrap, even back when whalebone was the most valuable product of whaling, used in everything from corset boning to sled runners. It’s too small to do anything real with, and so its only possible use is to entertain whalemen.
At the lower end, it frays off into fine hairs, and Marcus plucks those off with his fingernails; they litter the ground around him. At the end of this process, he holds the smooth piece, and wonders what he’s going to do with it. His mind drifts through Amos’s journal, thinking about the various pieces of scrimshaw and whittling that he describes. On his voyage, they were still hunting sperm whales, despite the floor of the market for whale oil falling out from under them with the availability and ease of petroleum, but that meant that Amos never talked much about baleen. But he liked most to carve little messages and trinkets for other people, and so spent a lot of time doing that on whatever wood or bit of tooth was at hand.
He lays the piece of baleen flat on his knee. When heated, the keratin in whalebone becomes flexible, and it will hold whatever shape it’s forced into when it cools. Marcus rolls his own wrist across the piece of scrap— it’s about the right size for a bracelet. Bryanne doesn’t often wear jewelry— it gets in the way— but she might appreciate something simple like that. He can feel the ghost of Amos smiling in approval of the idea.
He takes out a pencil from his pocket, and, in barely visible lines, sketches out the places where he’ll need to file the baleen down into shape, and then the design he’ll put on it. He’s not much of an artist, never has been, but the simple, blocky shapes of a cartoon whale are easy to draw, even for him: the rotund body, the friendly curve of the mouth, the striped lower part of the jaw— not really stripes, but folds of skin that expand to take in seawater— the comical tail, the tiny dot of an eye, the spout blowing out the top.
He draws several of these, swimming along the outside of the bracelet. On the backside, it’s blank. Probably anything he writes there will get smudged and worn away, if Bryanne actually wears the gift, but it feels like he should write something there. He taps the pencil against his teeth as he thinks, then carefully letters:
AND GOD SAID: LET THERE BE LIGHT NEW BEDFORD 2057
Amos, in his day, would have found the message wholly true, Marcus thinks, but it’s grimly ironic with two hundred years distance. But New Bedford is the city that lit the world, so it’s the message that Amos chooses. It feels melancholy— like it’s only to commemorate this particular moment in time, when he and Bryanne both live here, a four year voyage together in the city of oil.
School tours on the Wampanoag resume on Monday, and it’s clear that through whatever local grapevine kids have, the story of a ghost has spread. It really only takes one particularly loud and gleeful student telling everyone who will listen that his cousin’s best friend’s brother saw a ghost, for real, stalking the deck at night. This particular boy, Marcus sees (or, more pertinently, hears) waiting in line before the boat opens for the day. He’s small for an eighth grader, with curly brown hair, and a mouth too wide for his face, but exactly the right size for his loud voice, which cuts right through the drizzling rain.
Marcus, who is leaning on the rails of the ship before they open, watches the boy hold his phone up to take a picture. He uses his phone to project this image, dimly lit but clear even at a distance, onto one of the dock-side signs. Marcus blinks at the picture of himself suddenly appearing. The wavering quality of the light makes him unrecognizable; his face is unclear. It has the appearance of a much older photograph, not this weak projection out of a cheap phone— like he’s seeing Amos as he would have looked, rather than himself. He stares at the shaking photo, even though he should stand up and get ready for the tours to start.
Within half a minute, the boy has used an image generator to add a ghost to stand right behind Marcus in the frame, a thin boned man dressed in old-fashioned clothing, leering over him with hands like bloody claws. It’s a white man’s ghost, which is pretty funny— he supposes that he should be grateful that the salient identifying features of the “ghost” have been lost in the telling of the story. It must have been too dark last night for the boys’ cameras, if they were ever pointed at Marcus, to pick him up properly.
Even though everyone standing around the pier is aware that it’s a computer generated trick of the light, it still makes some of the girls nervous. “Ms. Jamison,” one whines. “Make him stop it.”
“Oliver, put that away,” the teacher says. “You know the rules about phones. If you use it, you lose it.”
But Ms. Jamison makes no move to enforce this rule, either on the laughing Oliver, who’s adding so many ghouls to his photographic creation that the scene is completely unrecognizable, or any of the other kids who are leaning on the ropes and texting.
Marcus tries to push the image out of his mind for a while as he gets ready to start his morning tours, but this proves very difficult. It’s not that the ship is haunted— or if it is, the last thing it’s haunted by is whalemen. The ship is younger than Marcus himself is; if it’s haunted by anything, it’s by the ghost of a persecuted Chinese billionaire, who built boats to get away from something that he knew he couldn’t escape.
Marcus’s tours on deck are fine. At this point in the summer, the tour script has been polished to a mirror sheen; he knows exactly what to say and how long it will take, and he is even interesting enough with the harpoons to keep most kids’ attention, and those who don’t pay attention tend to lean over the side and look at everything else going on, rather than causing trouble.
Marcus leads his first tour down into the steerage, shepherding middle schoolers like an unruly cohort of ducklings, and crams them into the room with its bunks on the walls and trunks on the floors. The only light that comes in is through the deck prism above, which is enough to see by; if it was any cloudier outside, he’d turn on one of their lamps and hold that up, the LEDs a fake spermaceti candle inside. But it’s ghostly dim, and some of the kids are nervous, not helped by the troublemaking Oliver projecting his flickering ghoul onto the walls whenever he can. The teacher corners him and confiscates the phone as soon as Oliver shines it at Marcus while he’s trying to explain the sleeping arrangements.
“Is this ship haunted?” one of the girls asks.
“Haunted?” Marcus says, scratching his chin. “Now, who’d you think it’d be haunted by?”
“I dunno,” the girl says. “Anybody die on board?”
“This ship was just built when we set out on our journey,” Marcus says. “And we’ve been very lucky so far— all of us’ve stayed safe— and thank God for that.”
“So, no one’s ever died here?” a different girl to his left confirms.
“Well. We’ve killed ourselves plenty of whales.” When Marcus turns to face that kid, he catches a glimpse of Amos in the little shaving mirror hung on the wall.
“Do you think whales have ghosts?” Amos asks, meeting Marcus’s eyes. “It’s a pagan thing to believe, but maybe they do.”