I Saw the Future in an Oil Slick

Thursday August 16, 2057

On the Thylacine , even in the middle of the night, even at dock, it’s never completely silent. The ship rocks and creaks almost imperceptibly, the batteries hum, the air conditioners belowdecks whirr, the sail shivers on deck, and the pump kicks on and off with a heavy thunk. Bryanne is used to this symphony, and finds it comforting, like the ship itself is reminding her that it’s alive, that she’s not the only one there, even when she’s the only person on board.

It’s bright, even below where there aren’t any windows. Lying in her tiny cabin on the lower level of the ship, the red emergency light glows unblinkingly, letting her see everything in her room with perfect clarity, as long as she lets her eyes adjust. The hallways, too, are lit with the same red-glow. Without passengers, the main lights are all off, but the emergency lights are always on.

At first, when she moved on board semi-permanently, she kept herself to her cabin and the staff rooms and the deck. It was what she was used to, and she didn’t feel the need to spend much time in the passenger areas. But now that she’s used to being alone on the ship, she doesn’t mind wandering through the hallways barefoot, or eating her breakfast at one of the nice tables in the main dining room. She sits there all alone, one plate on one white tablecloth, surrounded by an empty sea of dining chairs. 

She takes naps in the passenger cabins, picking the nicest room, much larger than her own, with a window. She lays on top of the neatly made bedspread in a puddle of sunlight like a cat. When she gets up, she doesn’t even leave a dent where her body was.

The cleaning staff come by on Tuesdays, and food and supplies for their next cruise are usually delivered on Thursdays, but this leaves Wednesdays completely empty. Bryanne has things that she can do— always some lingering piece of maintenance that she can stick her hands into— but it doesn’t take up all of her time. And she could easily leave the ship, go find Marcus, enjoy her days off and walk through town, but she doesn’t. 

Instead, she thinks about Atlas.

The Thylacine is a very different boat from Atlas’s tiny sailboat, but Bryanne can’t help but compare being alone to Atlas’s professed solo ocean crossings. She’s jealous of the experience, the idea of being totally alone and beholden to no one and nothing except the pressing problems of her own survival. It seems like— and she thinks ruefully of Marcus— a relic of a bygone age, when going to sea meant a total disconnection from normal life. Once upon a time, there was no SATCOM, no radar, no AIS, no GPS, no radio— just endless ocean, permanent, unchanging, and impersonal. 

The number of people filling out their tours continues to shrink, and so Bryanne has fantasies about taking the Thylacine out onto the ocean empty. Aside from food as a constraint to the length of a voyage, the sail and the batteries make it able move by itself for as long as it likes, if slowly. She doesn’t dream about stealing it, but she imagines being the only person on Earth left alive.

Bryanne is sitting in the empty dining room when the trouble comes to find her. It’s Thursday evening, and she knows that something is wrong, because the food delivery never came. She’s eating her dinner now, the last of the last of the leftovers from the previous tour, plastic wrapped salad gone limp and tiramisu gone both wet and stale. It still tastes alright, even if the texture is off. 

Being alone feels very natural to her now, and she lets that sense of solitude push every other thought out of her mind. Why did the normal food delivery not come? She doesn’t care. The only thing in the world that matters is the mechanical act of getting food onto her fork, lifting her fork to her mouth, chewing, swallowing. It’s an animalistic thought— as long as you have a meal in front of you now, it hardly matters where the next one is coming from.

This is what she tells herself, and when she hears heavy boots stomp across the deck above her head— very audible on such an empty and still ship— she does her best to ignore the sound. It’s just Mike, or one of the other crew. They’re the only ones who have the keys, and she can hear the doors above swinging open and thumping shut, and footsteps descending the stairs, muffled by the carpet in the passenger areas.

Her best attempt to ignore the sound is not very good; she tenses more and more with each creak and door-opening. There’s more than one person coming around, and now they’re below, down in the crew areas. She can hear muffled voices, even toned, professional.

She should get up and investigate. But she keeps eating until her dinner is gone, and when it is, she lays her fork delicately and calmly across her plate and waits in the dark dining room. It’s not completely lightless; the dining room has huge observation windows that usually look out to the ocean, but the sun is setting, and the ship is facing the wrong direction to catch the light.

Perhaps that’s why it takes so long for Mike and the rest of the people with him to find her; they’re not expecting her to be sitting in the dark. The wide double doors of the dining room swing open, and they stand in the hallway light. Mike isn’t in the front of the group, he’s standing off to the side, shoulders slumped, but he pushes forward through the huddle when he sees Bryanne. He’s holding up her day bag, lumpy and spilling open. He must have hastily jammed all of her belongings into it, not stopping to fold the few outfits she has.

“Bryanne,” he says, holding out her bag with his arthritic hand, “I’m sorry that this is short notice, but—”

She looks at the men next to him— they don’t look like port police, no uniforms. They’re wearing regular clothes, button downs and dress shoes, more like their usual passengers than sailors of any kind.

“It’s not illegal for me to sleep here,” Bryanne says, on the offchance that this is port police making a fuss about their licensing. It’s a futile hope, but she has to say something.

“This ship needs to vacated,” the man at the front of the group says. “Now.”

“It’s the bank,” Mike says, which is the explanation that Bryanne expects, and all that she needs.

“You never paid me for last week’s tour,” she says to Mike, who looks first genuinely sorry, and then annoyed.

“We can talk about that later,” he says.

There’s not going to be a later, and she’s not going to get paid, probably not even if she takes the issue to court. Can’t pay somebody money you don’t have. He’s still holding out her bag. The bank’s enforcers, or repo men, or whoever these other people are, don’t care about Bryanne’s paycheck, nor do they care if she has a place to go.

Slowly, Bryanne wipes her hands on her napkin, stands up, walks over to Mike, takes her bag, slings it over her shoulder, and then brushes past him without saying another word. If she had her way, she’d say goodbye to the ship, walk through it slowly, check it over one last time, and collect all the photographs and personal mementoes from the staff areas. But as she stomps past Mike, the bank men form up behind her, and escort her to the deck.

There’s a cool evening breeze, and when she stops to look up at the red sky, with the sail silhouetted against it, the man walking directly behind her bumps into her back.

“Do you have a place to go?” Mike tries to ask her, but she has nothing to say to him, and she raises her hand to shut him up and starts walking towards the ramp, and then onto the dock. Mike and the bank men remain on the ship, and don’t follow her.

She doesn’t know where she’s headed, and so she walks purposefully far enough that she can no longer see the ship behind her. She sticks her vape in her mouth and trudges along the pier until she gets to a park bench, looking out at the water, and she sits down onto it.

Her mother’s apartment isn’t that far away— over in Fall River. She could get on any bus and show up unannounced within the hour, and her mother would be thrilled to have her sleep on the couch and lord it over her. She closes her eyes and leans back on the metal bench, sliding down so that her legs stick all the way out over the sidewalk, and her neck rests against the top of the bench’s slats. She has a few friends in town— she could call them. Any of her coworkers would probably put her up for the night. Mike and his wife would let her crash in his guest bedroom, even. She could go ask Marcus to let her sleep on the Wampanoag .

But she doesn’t pick up her phone and call anyone. She sits on the bench, letting the darkness of night rise up around her like a swallowing tide. She probably would have sat there until morning, or until a cop came to yell at her, except that she hears a familiar whistling come down the street. She doesn’t even open her eyes as Atlas plops down on the bench beside her, and drapes her arm over Bryanne’s shoulder.

“Bee, I’m afraid I’ve come to be the bearer of bad news.”

Bryanne, without opening her eyes, fishes her foot underneath the bench, and kicks her day bag full of clothes out onto the sidewalk. “You’re too late.”

Atlas looks at the bag without processing it. “You’re quitting, too?”

Bryanne laughs, like a seagull. “Can’t quit if you’re fired!”

“You do something to piss Mike off?”

“We’re out of money.”

The situation clarifies for Atlas, and she laughs, too. “Incredible. Well— getting laid off is different from getting fired, you know.”

“Not that different.”

“Looks less bad for your next job.”

“Looks the same for collecting unemployment.”

“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Atlas says. “But, hey! I guess I’ll learn, if I let Mike tell me I don’t have a job before I tell him he doesn’t have an employee. You should be proud— I’ll have the opportunity to learn to leech off the government, instead of just my parents.”

“Shut up,” Bryanne says.

“Sure.” Atlas kicks her feet out in front of her, resting them on Bryanne’s day bag, the clothes spilling out onto the sidewalk. Through her teeth, she whistles a few bars of an ancient Stan Rogers song. O I coulda stayed to take the dole, but I’m not one of those; I get nothing free and that makes me an idiot, I suppose.

 “What was the bad news you came to tell me?” Bryanne asks. Getting her talking again is the only way to stop the whistling, probably.

“Oh. My grandmother died. My dad just called me to say. So I’m headed to Connecticut for a few days for the funeral— maybe a week— and then I’m gone. Nothing keeping me here.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Bryanne says mechanically.

“No, you’re not.” She tilts her head back and says, “And neither am I.”

“Congratulations on your freedom.”

“I should congratulate you on yours,” Atlas says. “You’re not going to be stuck at this job either. What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to find another job,” Bryanne says abruptly. “I can’t sit around doing nothing.”

“You’re so industrious— I’m jealous.”

“No, I just need money to live.”

Atlas cocks her head at Bryanne. “Are you jealous of me , Bee?”

She scowls down at her salad. “Don’t call me that. I don’t like nicknames.”

“Answer the question.”

“No.”

“Come on.”

“That was my answer.”

“You’re a liar, I guess.”

“Yeah,” Bryanne says. “Along with work, that’s another thing people learned how to do when we got kicked out of the Garden.”

Atlas laughs at her. “I’ll report back if my parents’ house in Connecticut is the Eden you seem to think it is.”

“Don’t bother.”

Atlas gives Bryanne another one of her funny little smiles. “I won’t even enjoy it down there,” she says. “I’m very used to being miserable in paradise.”

Bryanne purses her lips and says nothing.

“Oh, come on, Bee.”

“Are you here to say goodbye?”

“I came to offer you something,” Atlas says, and tugs on a lock of Bryanne’s hair.

“To let me go sailing? You already did mention that.”

“There won’t be any more tours,” she points out. “You have time. No reason for you to say no.” She pauses and looks at Bryanne seriously. “Do you even have a place to go? If Mike kicked you out— were you just going to stay on this bench?”

“I don’t know why you’re so eager for me to take your boat,” Bryanne says, ignoring the question. “I wouldn’t trust anyone with it, if I was you. I’d be too worried about someone sinking it.”

“I trust you.”

Bryanne looks away, across the dark water. All the sailboats are picturesque, and so are the seagulls darting around before they take their leave and settle in for the night. 

“You deserve a vacation,” Atlas says.

“Deserve is a funny concept.”

“You really do hate sailing, don’t you?”

“I don’t hate it,” Bryanne says. In fact, she loves the idea a little too much. It would be tempting to steal Atlas’s boat and never return. “I just have no reason to go anywhere. What would I do out there? I have things I should be…” She trails off into nothingness.

“Find your whale,” Atlas says.

“There are no whales,” Bryanne says. “They’re gone. We saw the last one.”

“You don’t really believe that.”

“I don’t?”

“Of course you don’t. If you did, you wouldn’t be arguing with me about it,” Atlas points out. “You’d just go sailing and enjoy the weather and the wind, and not worry about chasing whales. You’re afraid of looking for something and not finding it.” She clucks her tongue and wags her finger in a cliche admonition. “Disappointment is a terrible thing to be scared of. You’re letting it hold you back.”

“I don’t need this lecture from you, of all people.”

“Who else is more qualified to give it?”

Bryanne shakes her head and looks away.

“I’m leaving tomorrow morning first thing. Train to Boston, then down to Hartford. I’ll be gone for a week, minimum. Do you want the boat or not?” She fishes in her pocket and jingles a set of keys in front of Bryanne. “It’s not like you have anywhere better to go.”

“Why?” Bryanne asks again.

Atlas smiles at her, the tip of her tongue sticking out past her teeth. “It’ll be nice, when I’m at home, to imagine that somebody else, somewhere, is having a good time. You’d be doing me a favor, providing me some fodder for my imagination.”

This is a patently absurd reason, but Bryanne looks at Atlas, who is still holding out the keys, and reaches out to take them from her. “Fine.”

Atlas grabs Bryanne’s wrist lightly, holding her hand in the air. “Well, those are my only keys, so you’d better come back with me tonight. I’ll show you the lay of the land— the Whole Wide World .”

Bryanne hates being trapped, but Atlas is grinning at her so congenially that she doesn’t pull her hand away immediately. Atlas’s hand is broad and sturdy, calloused like her own from hauling ropes and splicing lines, but this isn’t immediately obvious unless she’s touching you.

Atlas’s smile is triumphant, and without letting go of Bryanne’s wrist, stands and pulls Bryanne to her feet. By now, the feeling of being held in her grip is beginning to stale, and Bryanne pulls herself free so that she can pick up her day bag and spilled clothes from the ground, shaking the sidewalk dust off of them. 

Although the ocean breeze was cool enough when they were sitting still on the bench, they both begin sweating as they take the long walk down the port road towards where the Whole Wide World is docked, stepping over the train tracks that pass through the sidewalk at regular intervals. Their shadows stretch long and blue before them, and although Atlas is usually chatty, they don’t say much. 

“I really am sorry about your grandma,” Bryanne says, breaking the silence when the Wampanoag ’s tall masts come into view.

“It’s alright.”

“Were you close?”

“I’m the only grandchild,” Atlas says, which doesn’t answer the question. Even though the tall ship’s masts are visible, there’s still some ways to walk, and they slow down as they get closer. “She’s lucky, I guess.”

“Lucky?”

“She gets to die at home and rich and surrounded by family, right? Isn’t that as lucky as anybody gets?”

“I’d rather not die.”

“Don’t think anybody gets a choice about that,” Atlas says.

“Is your guilty conscience suddenly telling you that your whole family should be hanged for crimes against the biosphere?” Bryanne asked. “I didn’t think you had that kind of self awareness in you.”

Atlas looks up at the Wampanoag ’s masts. “You only get to choose the when and how if you decide you’re leaving the party early.” She pauses, then nods at the tall ship, or the memory of it. “When I went to that party, with my dad as a kid— they took the ship out to sea. I couldn’t leave if I wanted to, unless I wanted to start swimming. Three in the morning, I was so tired— I was just a little kid. And everyone was drunk and Mr. Zhang was yelling about sailing off the edge of the world.” She trails off.

“What ever happened to him?” Bryanne asks. “I know he died— that’s why this is here.”

“Left the party before the authorities could break it up,” Atlas says. “Museums around the world are lucky— he could leave all this in his will rather than having everything seized by the state first. Works out better for everyone that way. Saved his government a bit of bad PR, too. It was very pragmatic of him. Generous, even.”

Bryanne glances at Atlas, who shakes herself and puts her goofy grin back on her face, no longer wanting to discuss the subject.

They tromp down the dock, and then easily hop on board Atlas’s bobbing sailboat. Just as it was the last time Bryanne was on board, she’s surprised by how neat and clean it is. Atlas, for all she projects being carefree, is fastidious in the way she keeps her boat. She should ask Marcus how often he sees her scrubbing down the deck. 

The thought of Marcus is the one thing Bryanne managed to push out of her mind while they were walking, but now she glances up at the Wampanoag towering above them. Up on the mast, small enough with distance that she can’t make him out, is Marcus, standing like a statue next to the scarecrow, peering out into the darkness. He’s barely visible, only the outline of him caught by the dockside lights below.

Bryanne stares up at him, like a statue herself, hands on her hips.

“Oh, him,” Atlas says, when she comes back from unlocking the hatch down into her cabin. “Hey! Amos!”

“That’s not his name.” But it’s now too late to do anything other than get his attention. She’s surprised that Atlas wants to summon him down— she had thought, well, she hadn’t known what she had thought. But Atlas is waving like a maniac, and Marcus is turning to look at them. She raises her hand in a wave. “Marcus! It’s me!”

Why is she surprised when he shimmies down the ropes?

“Do you talk to him a lot?” Bryanne asks.

“Sometimes,” Atlas says. “It’s good manners to be neighborly.” She laughs. “Are you still…?”

“I don’t know.” Bryanne watches Marcus cross the deck and hop the barrier to head down the gangway.

“He’s been alright, if you’re wondering. I know you haven’t been here to talk to him.”

Bryanne scowls, but when Marcus stands at the edge of the dock, asking permission to come on board with his usual goofy smile, those apple-round cheeks and a simple sincerity in the way the expression swallows up his eyes, she tries to put her annoyance aside. He’s still wearing his costume, but she’s no longer surprised by this. It’s part and parcel of the stranger he’s become to her.

“Come on board,” Atlas says magnanimously. “How’ve you been?”

“Fine,” Marcus says. He hops on board. “Hey, Bryanne.”

The way he’s standing makes it obvious what he feels— that awkward shuffle of coming close but not too close, stifling hands that want to hold by shoving them deep in his pockets, smiling but chagrined, not asking for anything but wanting it anyway, and not sure if he should. It’s familiar to her, and he’s never been anything other than earnest to a fault, a counterpoint to her gruffness. If it had been any other day, two months ago, they would have embraced each other; he would have stroked his hand down her hair and she would have nestled herself against him. But instead they stand a few feet apart, looking at each other. Atlas watches them.

“I’m headed down to my family’s house for a week or so,” Atlas says, “and then I’m leaving town.”

“Where are you going?” Marcus asks.

“Connecticut.”

“No, after that.”

“I might head out to the Azores. Or go down to Cuba, if the hurricane season doesn’t look like it’s going to be too bad. I don’t really want to be in New England when winter gets here.”

Winter— the idea of it is as foreign to Bryanne as either of the ports Atlas named. It seems like a thousand years away, and unimaginable with summer still clinging to them. Even though the sun is now fully down, the hot air is still swallowing the three of them. Atlas is still sweating, a bead of it running from her temple to her jaw.

“Oh, I’ll be sorry to see you go,” Marcus says.

“Gotta keep moving.” She says it lightly, but she says everything lightly. “Anyway, since I’m going— I figured Bee could take a little vacation while I’m gone.” She taps the solar panels that are within reach, and then wanders away down the short deck of the boat, checking things over. As she does, she calls back over her shoulder, “Since the tours are canceled, might as well—” and re-explains to Marcus what little she’s managed to gather about the end of the Thylacine .

Bryanne and Marcus listen to her, but they’re looking at each other.

“I’m sorry about the Thylacine ,” Marcus says, and he looks back behind himself at the tall ship behind them. “That sucks.”

“It’s fine,” Bryanne says, and then adds, ruefully, “It just means that I’ll have to get another job. You were right when you told me to.”

Marcus’s smile dims. “I’m sorry that we fought about it,” he says. “I didn’t mean to—”

“No, it’s fine. Don’t worry about it.”

“Do you have somewhere to go?”

“My mom’s, I guess, for now.”

“Yeah,” he says, and doesn’t follow it up. His shoulders are hunched, and she can see his hands clenching and unclenching in his pockets, some anxious habit of his.

“Come with me,” Bryanne says abruptly. “Out on the water for a few days.”

She doesn’t know why she offers, and at the bow of the boat, Atlas, who is now listening to them, once again rattles the harpoon that’s still stuck in the deck.

Marcus shifts back and forth on his feet. “I have work,” he says. “I can’t just leave them without someone to do my part of the tour.”

They both know exactly what Bryanne is demanding and offering— a last chance. “They can rearrange it so that one of the tour leads does your part, can’t they?”

Marcus nods, but looks away from Bryanne again, back at the ship.

“Marcus,” she says, and he looks at her with strange and wide eyes. “Come with me.”

He’s reluctant, and she wishes she didn’t understand why.

“Why are you asking me?”

She shakes her head. 

“I can’t,” he admits. Is it a relief to both of them, to finally break that last tie?

It’s not, she decides. Even though they’ve been living apart for weeks, when she looks at him, strange and ungainly as he is, she misses him. The idea of sailing alone is proper, and the subject of her dreams, but those dreams have been as close to nightmares as dreams get before she wakes up in a feverish sweat. She doesn’t want them to become real, no matter how vivid they are— maybe that’s the difference between the two of them. She wonders what it is about his dream that he’s clinging to so tightly— she’s never really asked him about Amos, despite how much that dead man seemed like an invisible third person hovering in between them.

“It’s real,” she offers. “Going sailing.”

“I know it is,” Marcus says. “It’s not that.”

Then what is it? she wants to ask, but Marcus would tell her about his responsibilities to his job, how he can’t leave them in the lurch, even if there is a replacement.

She reaches across the distance between them and puts her hand on his arm. “Well— if you change your mind. I won’t be leaving until the morning.”

He nods. 

“Bee,” Atlas calls from the other end of the boat, listening and choosing the best moment to interrupt. “Let me show you where the radio is, and how to hook up the motor.”