In a Dream You Saw a Way to Survive, and You Were Full of Joy
Thursday August 16, 2057
Marcus slinks back to the Wampanoag , and then sits on the deck for a while, listening to Bryanne and Atlas’s voices drift through the air. They’re not exactly joking with each other— Bryanne is too serious— but they have a clear camaraderie that carries in their tones, if not their words. Bryanne is quick on the uptake whenever Atlas says anything, except when she isn’t. When Bryanne is silent, Atlas will chime in again with a laugh and a wheedling tone. After a while working on deck, they head below. The sky is black now, and when they retreat out of hearing, it’s silent except for the water and the sounds of the city: police sirens, cars, some men yelling distantly outside one of the bars.
He goes inside the main cabin, where he has the printed copy of Amos’s journal open on the table, and the fake lanterns lit, with their LEDs flickering behind frosted glass. By now, the spine of the book is cracked and the glue is loosening the first few pages, where he’s pulled the cover back one too many times. There are no secrets left to uncover inside the book— he’s read it from front to back, and spent as much effort as he could divining who wrote in the end pages. He thinks it’s a stranger, someone who found the book in an old trunk sold at auction, and prized it for its blank pages rather than its written ones. He’s lucky that the girl never got around to using the written journal pages as a scrapbook, abandoning the effort or getting a new blank book before she ran completely out of space.
Even though there’s nothing else to discover, he sits down to read it anyway, checking over the last few days of Amos’s writing. Was there a mutiny, even an attempted one, on board? If there was, Joe probably would have mentioned it during one of their tours. If there wasn’t, did Amos successfully steal a boat and row himself and Tobey to Hawai’i, leaving all his belongings behind when he did? It’s possible. Not likely— and he knows that Amos’s flight was one of desperation rather than rationality— but it’s possible. He clings to the same small hope as a man who’s a hundred years dead. Maybe Amos and Tobey were caught stealing the boat, and left in chains on the deck, and then abandoned in port. The idea makes Marcus shiver, but if that were the case, they would at least make it off the ship alive.
All of this would be recorded in the log, but he hasn’t checked the log. He can’t explain what his reluctance is, other than that the unknown has safety in its infinite possibilities.
He’s going to let his life slide by him, with the number of comforting fantasies that he clings to. That’s the core of his problems— or at least his mother would tell him so. He can imagine things so thoroughly that they act as a cozy substitute for the real. He wonders, ruefully, if he were Amos and truly on the ship, would the exertion and danger actually force him to act, or would he end up dreaming four years away as easily as he does now.
He jerks up and stands, taking the lantern in one hand and the printed journal in the other. He walks through to the masters’ quarters, to the room where the logbook is kept. The replica log, digitally printed but hand-bound to look just like the original, is sitting on the writing desk. Even though it’s one of the tour props that gets passed from hand to hand, it still looks too crisp and new. Maybe after running tours on the ship for half a decade, it will be as beat up as the real log is. The paper is thin, but it has modern strength and is not heavy and brittle like the logbooks in the museum collection. The cover, like Amos’s journal, is pretty marbled paper, though this one is done in blues and blacks, with flecks of yellow dye scattered throughout. Even the marbling is printed, though— a cleaned up scan of the original log’s cover printed out, rather than purchasing real marbled paper in a similar color scheme, with all the randomness that would introduce. The reproduction is faithful, but undeniably fake.
Marcus sits down at the writing desk and pages through the log. There’s a noticeable change in hand partway through, when the first officer received an unexpected promotion to master, and the former second officer had to take on the duty of maintaining the log. It’s too bad that Amos never got to fill out the log— he would have enjoyed it.
Maybe he survived and was later able to become a mate on another ship— but, no, Amos didn’t want that, and there would be a painful irony if he did end up going to sea again. But that possibility is slim, regardless, and not something Marcus can divine from this book alone.
He pages through the log until he finds what he’s looking for, the days following Amos’s last entry, and reads them. It takes a minute for the reality to sink in, after he reads the words slowly, over and over. Tobey and Amos, overboard and drowned.
With increasing agitation, he reads through the next few pages of the log. They’re never mentioned again, aside from a mention of auctioning off belongings when the ship gets to port. So they were dead, and a callous and impartial hand wrote it down, with no explanations or details. Not even their names were included.
Marcus throws the log against the wall in an uncharacteristic burst of anger. It bounces off the wall and hits the lamp sitting on top of the writing desk, which then crashes and knocks the compass and barometer off their perches. They clatter to the ground, and the barometer lands with a twinkle of breaking glass as its front dial shatters.
Marcus puts his head in his hands, and the room sways with a dizzy light as the lantern rolls around the floor until it comes to rest.
It shouldn’t matter to him what happened to Amos and Tobey— they’re like any men of history, anyone who lived and built some small and inconsequential piece of the world, and then who died. There’s thousands of other whalemen, even thousands who left journals behind, who Marcus would never find himself distraught over. Their joy and suffering, as soon as they step out of the direct light of the world, pass behind the curtain, disappear into the water, is lost from living memory and sinks into the entropic stream, the consequences of what they thought and felt only being made real in the marks they left on the world. The only mark that Amos left is in the slim journal— and anonymous barrels of whale oil sold for cents on the gallon, greasing the gears of a new age’s machines, or burning as candles until they went out.
History is made entirely of men who are ground up and spat out— men and whales and the bones of the Earth.
He doesn’t move for a long time, and when he does, he stumbles through the ship in the dark, leaving the lantern on and in the shattered remains of the barometer. He climbs into his bed in the steerage, and sleeps.
He dreams about drowning, an endless ocean without shore or ship in sight, and always trying to hold someone else up above the water, dragging a heavy body in his arms, kicking so that Tobey’s head doesn’t go under, no matter if the water fills his own mouth and covers his eyes.
Marcus usually wakes up well before he needs to for work— he’s a light sleeper at the best of times, and he’s anxious living on the ship, fearing getting caught, so as soon as the church bells down the street begin tolling at six, he’s up. But today the nightmare has him in its clutches, and he doesn’t wake up until Joe begins stomping across the deck above. It’s still very dim, especially in the steerage, with the only the grey morning light filtering in through the deck prism, but it’s lighter than it should be, and this tells Marcus that he’s in danger.
For a moment, he doesn’t remember who or where he is— the sound of the master’s footsteps above strike a too-familiar terror into his heart, and the fear of being caught out for sleeping on board without permission tangles up with Amos’s terror at the master’s vindictiveness. They’re one and the same fears, or they might as well be.
He slips out of the steerage and presses himself into the shadows, waiting for Joe’s footsteps to recede. Joe goes into the master’s cabin, and Marcus can hear him swear as he catches sight of the shattered barometer and the mess left in the room, probably thinking that Marcus forgot to lock up when he left (again) and that vandals got in. While he’s distracted picking up the broken instruments, it’s Marcus’s chance, and he quickly climbs up to the deck, lightly runs across it while Joe is below, and escapes onto the dock, out of sight of the ship.
He doesn’t know where to go now. Reasonably, what he should do is head to the YMCA, take his usual morning shower there, and then get ready for work. He’ll have to face whatever consequences come from Joe believing he didn’t lock up, but he’s barely even thinking about that. His desire not to return to the ship is deeper than a fear of official reprimand. The idea of stepping back on board the Wampanoag makes him feel ill, like he’ll die if he goes back. The fear is totally irrational, but it constricts his throat and makes his vision shaky, his heartbeat throbbing underneath his tongue.
He should go to the library, email his mother, ask her for help, ask to move back into her house for a few weeks until he calms down and gets his life back together. But instead he sees Atlas’s little sailboat, and he leaps on board without thinking.
The noise of him stumbling around on deck causes the hatch to open, and out comes Byranne, blinking in the light and looking disheveled after a night of sleep in an unfamiliar location. She’s surprised to see him, and he’s surprised to see her, even though he knew she would be there. She gives him a long, searching look as they stand there looking at each other.
“I changed my mind,” Marcus says, holding out his hands in a shrug and reaching for the only thing he could possibly say.
Bryanne’s mouth is sticky with sleep, and she tries to speak, then clears her throat before she can get the words out. “Where’s Atlas?”
“I didn’t see her,” Marcus says.
Bryanne runs her hand over her face, rubbing her eyes, and then waves her arm to give Marcus permission to go where he likes on the little boat. If Atlas is gone, it’s hers for now. He isn’t really sure what to do with himself, though he does go below, if only to stop Joe on the Wampanoag from seeing and hearing him.
The interior of the boat is small, and extremely neatly kept. Even though the craft is very utilitarian, with a tiny galley area and even smaller head, and with floorboards that can all be lifted up to get to the spaces underneath where water goes to be pumped out, it’s nevertheless very pretty inside, clearly a toy for the rich and not a working vessel.
The furthest aft area has a bed raised up and tucked into the slim space between the deck above and the storage drawers below. Behind the fiberglass walls is probably the tiny motor with its batteries, but Marcus doesn’t investigate. A little way forward, there’s a small dining table and a bench built into the wall. Surprisingly, on the starboard wall, there’s a bookshelf, full of books all individually sealed in ziplock bags, and held tight against the wall with cord, to stop them from falling out as the boat moves. Below that are cabinets, and Marcus assumes they contain a mixture of useful things and life detritus, but it’s all tucked away so neatly that he can’t see any of it. Bryanne’s day bag is the only thing that looks out of place, sitting on the floor in front of the bed, with her clothes spilling out of it from when she fished through it for a new day’s outfit.
At the fore end of the boat, the harpoon sticks down through the deck into the ceiling above him. He reaches up and examines the harpoon toggle. He’s surprised that Atlas never seriously tried removing it, because he can see that it’s a simple matter, now that he’s gotten close. The iron of the harpoon goes all the way down through the deck’s planking, and it rests above the deck on the wider part of the wooden pole, which is stuck into the socket of the iron. When darting the harpoon, the wooden pole is what would be held by the harpooner— it’s heavy, and helps add force to the throw. The socket is wider than the thinnest part of the harpoon’s shank, but thinner than the harpoon’s head, and so the whole thing can be disassembled and freed easily, just by detaching the wood from the iron, and then drawing the iron below through the deck. It only requires two people to do so— one above and one below, pulling from either end to yank the wooden pole free. It would leave a hole in the deck, where the iron passed through, but not as large as drawing the whole wooden pole through, or trying to get the head back up. He can see that Atlas tried that several times, from the scratched wooden planking on the ceiling, the upward pointing barbs of the iron having gouged into the wood as she tried to pull it out.
Marcus waits for Bryanne to finish her work on the deck. She comes back down eventually, while he’s still contemplating the harpoon.
“Gonna cast off in a minute,” she says. “Your boss is looking for you.”
He nods, but doesn’t say anything.
“Deserting?” she asks. “You could at least call in sick.”
“I have a bad work ethic. I’m destined for a lifetime of no-call-no-show.”
This actually makes her laugh, though it’s not really funny. “Maybe it’s for the best.”
It certainly isn’t— they’re both about to be unemployed and homeless, a bad state for people to be in, even if they can lean on their parents for a while. Something strikes him as funny about them both suffering this strange quirk of circumstance together, even though it’s caused their mutual life to fall apart. “Maybe it will force me to figure things out.”
“Is that why you’re here?” she asks.
“No.”
She gives him a questioning look.
There’s the truth, which he doesn’t understand and can’t communicate, and the lie that is easy to say. “I missed you.”
She smiles, and maybe she knows it’s not true. He’s not a good actor, and he still has his one hand on the shank of the harpoon.
“Yeah,” she says, but turns away from him. “There’s food in the cupboards and fridge if you want breakfast. Don’t cook anything— I don’t trust you with that gimbal. But there’s bread and peanut butter and granola.”
“Do you need any help casting off?”
She laughs. “Not from you.”
Marcus doesn’t know where they’re headed on the boat. He can look at the compass and digital maps all he wants, but this doesn’t give him much insight into where Bryanne is taking them. She points her nose into the salty air, and the boat obeys her. They don’t talk much in the first few hours of the journey. It’s reminiscent of being at home, a companionable and familiar silence, and, as always, it helps for Bryanne to have something to do. It keeps her hands busy. She runs the motor for the first part of the journey, moving them at a speed of a few knots out of the river, and then out to sea, keeping a careful eye on the instruments and the horizon to make sure they’re not running into anyone else.
When they’re far enough out at sea that the risk of encounters with other vessels is much lower, Bryanne turns off the motor. The sails snap in the brisk, hot wind, and they bounce along. They head northeast, the auto steering— an entirely mechanical mechanism of rope— keeping them pointed directly into the wind. It lets Bryanne take her hand off the tiller, and so she sits on the deck, alert but relaxed.
“It’s different with real sails,” she says unprompted. “I complain about the Thylacine ’s tower, but it does make traveling against the wind easier.”
“Are we making good time?”’ Marcus asks.
“We don’t have a destination.”
But she clearly has some idea of where she wants to be, since she points the boat towards it. North, and out to sea. The ocean around them is empty, but the sky is filled with towering white clouds. Marcus is worried about summer thunderstorms and squalls, but Bryanne ignores them, maybe having consulted the weather before they left. He could turn on the radio and check the weather report, but doesn’t.
He likes the silence and emptiness of the ocean, the way it clears his mind. The tiny, modern sailboat is not the Wampanoag , and they’re in the Atlantic, not the South Pacific. This boat isn’t even that much larger than the tiny whaling boats that the hunt was conducted in. He wonders how long this little boat could go for, with the rations it has on board. Probably not very far— he doubted that Bryanne and Atlas stocked up for a transatlantic journey, or any trip longer than a few days.
Marcus often goes down below, but Bryanne remains resolutely on deck, often standing and leaning on the rail, looking out at the horizon, looking for whales.
At dinnertime, he makes them both sandwiches, turkey and mayo from the tiny solar-powered refrigerator below. Bryanne eats half of hers, picks the meat out with her fingers, then feeds the rest of the bread to a seagull that has decided to hitch a ride on the prow, ruffling its feathers in the wind.
Marcus goes over to the harpoon, causing the seagull to move, affronted, to the top of the mast.
“Help me get this out,” he says. “If we pull it apart, we can get it through.”
“And what will you do with it when we do?”
“It’s just getting in the way,” he says. “It’s right in the middle of the deck. Atlas will appreciate having it out.”
This is an undeniable fact, and so she acquiesces. Marcus goes below, and on the count of three tugs as hard on the iron shank of the harpoon as he can, and Bryanne hauls upward on the wood. The two pieces come apart violently with their combined force, the harpoon’s iron piece rocketing down through the planking of the deck with Marcus leaning his whole weight on it to drag it down. Both of them, above and below, tumble to the ground as it comes loose, Bryanne stumbling backwards and falling with a thump, and Marcus crashing down under his own body weight, unbalanced on his toes.
He brings the harpoon shank triumphantly back up on deck, and Bryanne hands him the wooden piece. He experimentally tests putting them back together, sticking the narrowed end of the pole into the socket. It’s loose, but he can probably hammer it back into shape enough to hold on. Below, he looks through Atlas’s cupboards to find her tools, and discovers that she has a hammer that will probably work. He sits down with it, the harpoon on his lap, while Bryanne keeps scanning the horizon. It’s growing too dark for her to see anything, even other ships.
With a repetitive clank, of the hammer, careful not to strike the iron so hard that it cracks, he tries to narrow the socket. He realizes, after hitting it and inspecting it closely to make sure that brittle cast iron wasn’t breaking under his delicate blows, that it’s not actually cast iron— it’s machined steel— too ductile and smooth to be iron. Holding it up to catch the light, he can see the circles where the milling tool drew across it, and it has none of the lumpy irregularities that cast iron would have. The reproduction is made of a higher quality material than the original was, because the original was made with economies of scale in mind that don’t make sense for this fragment of an out-of-time object. It’s almost funny to him that he never took real notice of it before, even if he was subconsciously aware of it every time he held it. Even if it’s steel, he doesn’t think he’ll be able to refrain from calling it the iron .
He jams the wooden pole into it as tightly as it can go, and then hammers it further into place. It’s still fairly loose and would come apart again with a solid tug, but it’s together. When he’s done, he stands in the prow of the sailboat and holds it out over the water, like he’s going to strike something below them.
“What are you doing?” Bryanne asks.
“Nothing,” Marcus says. “There’s nothing there.”
“Obviously.”
He swings the harpoon experimentally, letting the wooden pole slide through his grip before he tightens his hand around it, making sure he doesn’t lose it to the jostling waves.
“Stop it,” Bryanne says. “You’re freaking me out.”
“Why?”
“You’re going to fall overboard.”
“I’m wearing a lifejacket.”
“Marcus!”
He turns towards her and leans on the harpoon, the butt end of the wood resting on the deck, the iron over his head. She stares at him, then shakes her head.
“Aren’t we looking for whales?” he asks.
She pinches the bridge of her nose, turns away from him, and takes her vape from her pocket to stick it in her mouth.
“I’m joking, Bee.”
“Don’t fucking call me that,” she says. “It’s bad enough with Atlas— I don’t need it from you.”
“Sorry.” He’s tempted to ask her exactly what Atlas is in her life, but decides against it, instead going to sit on the deck in front of her, while she occupies the long cushioned seat. He leans back against the bulwark and rests the harpoon on his crossed legs.
“It’s a replica,” he says. “And I think they glued it together before.”
Bryanne just nods, looking out to sea.
“You can tell,” he says, and holds up the toggle end of the harpoon. “Ones that were used on ships, they would carve the name of the ship into the iron, and then which boat the harpoon belonged to. This one’s blank.”
He runs his hand over the iron, which is warm like flesh in the heat of the evening.
“You don’t have to think about it having killed a whale,” he says, when Bryanne doesn’t say anything. “It’s just a toy.”
“I know.” She tips her head back and looks at the slowly darkening sky. They might be far enough from shore that ambient light pollution isn’t too bad— Marcus is looking forward to seeing the stars.
“It’s funny,” he says. “It’s not even iron— it’s steel.”
She nods, though this information about its material properties makes no difference to her.
“Even on a molecular level, I bet you could tell that this is modern,” he says, hoisting the harpoon up. “It’s post-atomic steel. All the ambient radiation in the air from bombs and accidents gets forced in there during the steel making process and gets trapped…” He’s just talking, going into lecture mode and spinning one fact from another to fill dead air. “When people need clean steel that doesn’t have that kind of radioactive signature in it, they get it from old shipwrecks. Scavenging sunk battleships from an earlier age to use their bones.”
Bryanne doesn’t seem to know what to do with this information. “What did they do with all the old whaleships?” she asks.
“Burned them for firewood,” he says. “Everything gets broken up for scrap eventually. Except the ones that went to a museum.”
“Do you think in a hundred years, they’re going to have an oil tanker as a museum piece? Or is there not enough romance in it?”
“Nothing’s romantic until it’s gone,” Marcus says. He turns the shaft of the harpoon, spinning it against his legs. “Or at least until it’s dying.”
She laughs. “Maybe you’re right.”
“And there’s nothing romantic about modern life.” It’s a joke, for all the sociological implications he’s trying to put into it. But Bryanne thinks he’s serious.
“There it is.” She closes her eyes.
They’re both quiet. Marcus should say something to her— about their future, about their relationship, about anything other than Amos— but he can’t find the right way to approach it. All he knows is that having her in front of him makes him feel more solid than he has in weeks, and he should do something to keep her there, so that he doesn’t blow away in the wind.
“I’m thinking of taking that job my uncle says he can get me,” Bryanne says abruptly.
“Really?”
She shrugs, hitting her shoulders against the wall behind her. Her hair is static-clinging to the plastic, despite how wet everything is. “I need a job,” she says. “I need a job and I need the money.” When Marcus says nothing, she asks, “Are you surprised?”
“I guess.”
“Didn’t think I’d abandon my principles?” she asks bitterly.
“You usually don’t change your mind.”
She picks up a piece of rope from the deck and twists it around her hands, her fingers turning red from how tightly she wraps them. “True.”
He can’t tell if she wants him to ask her why she’s changed her mind or not. She usually doesn’t volunteer information, but she was the one who brought up the subject. He pulls his knees up to his chest, wrapping his arms around them and leaning his chin on his forearm. “Should I wish you good luck with it?” he asks.
“No,” she says. “You should hope I die.” She presses her head back against the plastic wall.
“ Death to the living, long life to their killers, success to all the sailors’ wives, and greasy luck to all the whalers ,” he quotes, thinking of the poem that was once carved a piece of scrimshaw. It’s not a line that he delivers on his part of the tour, but he hears it echo up from the forecastle as Jules calls it out in his singsong voice. It rings around in his head, and comes out now.
“Yeah.” She’s quiet for a long time. “If we see a whale, I won’t take the job,” she eventually pronounces.
“Why?”
“Because if there’s any left out there, that’s something still left to ruin.” She looks out over the top of his head at the horizon. “If there isn’t— who cares?”
It’s a funny logic, and they both know it’s a wrong one, but it doesn’t matter.
“I hope we see one.”
“Sure.”
“I never have,” Marcus says. “I’ve never seen a whale. I want to.”
“I should have asked Mike to let you come on one of our tours. A few years ago, when there were some left.”
Marcus shakes his head.
“Yeah, too late.”
There seems to be nothing left to say. Two years too late or ten or a hundred or two hundred— neither of them can change the past that they’re tied to.
The sun goes down red behind the puffy clouds on the horizon, and Bryanne stares at the open water until she can’t keep her eyes open. She takes in the sails so that their speed drops to almost nothing, and then goes down below. She doesn’t ask Marcus to join her, but she gives him a long look, which he doesn’t know how to respond to.
“I’ll keep an eye out for whales,” he says.
“It’s too dark to see anything.”
But he doesn’t turn away from the sky, stars stuck in it like rivets. She heads down into the belly of the boat, and closes the hatch behind her. He vaguely intends to go down, but as he stands with his hands on the rail, he loses track of time completely.
The darkness of summer nights is never quite as thick and complete as those of winter, so he still thinks that he can see quite clearly as he watches the horizon. He’s looking for whales, or other sails, or anyone swimming through the water in need of rescue. But none of those things pass by— only the occasional piece of garbage that bobs past the prow: tattered plastic bags and soda cans and once a yellow buoy cut loose from its tether.
Hours pass.
On the horizon, he sees a flick of white, the spray of foam from a whale’s spout. It rises up into the air, then vanishes against the sea in the direction of the prevailing wind. It’s so far off, and the night is so dark with just the light of the moon, that he can barely make it out, especially as the sailboat dips and rises in the sea swell. But he trains his eyes on that point on the horizon, and there it is again: a regular puff of breath from a whale, a few seconds after the first.
This spouting becomes the single most important thing in the world to him, and they’re moving in the wrong direction to get to it. He goes back to the tiller and tries to turn the boat towards the whale, but has no success. He can’t wrench them in the right direction; he doesn’t know how.
With Bryanne below, the little sailboat moves like a ghost ship, the automatic steering mechanism doing most of the work. Their transponder is set to alert them if they come too close to any other vessels, or if they end up blown off course, but that alarm doesn’t sound to wake Bryanne, and so they sail on, away from the flash of white air.
Amos would laugh at him for being unable to steer them— a boatsteerer who can’t sail at all.
This thought only keys the desire to see a whale higher.
The whale’s breath puffs on the horizon again as the boat crests a wave. It’s growing farther and farther away, every second that he wastes. Marcus clings to the rail, then, heedlessly, swings one leg over, then the other, until he’s sitting perched over the side. The water splashes his legs. He carefully but quickly pulls off his shoes and throws them back onto the deck.
It’s insane to think about swimming for it. He knows, rationally, that even with a life jacket, he’s likely to drown, and even if he doesn’t drown, as soon as he slips out of sight of the Whole Wide World , he’ll be lost at sea and unable to get back. What he should do is wake up Bryanne, but he doesn’t.
He’s not thinking about anything on this tiny sailboat. Instead, his mind is somewhere far away and long ago, and he’s standing on the deck of the Wampanoag with Tobey, frantically greasing up the ropes to lower one of the boats down into the water.
Tobey is looking around while Amos deals with the boat. He’s lucky that he’s convinced Tobey to leave, he thinks. The alternative is too terrible to contemplate, because it would end in certain death. Tobey isn’t completely convinced that running is the best option, even now, even as he tries, as quietly as possible, to load a few days worth of water and food onto the tiny sailboat. He’s lucky that Tobey can be swayed by talk of freedom, just as much as he can be by ideas of revenge.
But this is a perilous plan. One wrong step, one wrong person appearing on deck to look at what is going on, will end in disaster. Most of the crew, at least most people in the forecastle, are with Tobey in his ideas of mutiny, but even those who aren’t will be happy to see him go— it lessens the danger on the ship for everyone. So, the other hands on watch turn a blind eye to what they’re doing. And everyone is too exhausted after days of useless chase to do anything to stop them. Everyone wants to reach port, and maybe a desertion and theft of a whaleboat, especially after one has already been lost, will convince the master to turn them towards the Sandwich Islands at last.
The ropes slide silently, the boat lowering down.
It’s only the officers who pose a problem, and Tobey glances back again and again as they slowly work.
The sea is choppy, and the Wampanoag sways and leans. It’s a clear night, but windy, and the waves bob them across the water. As they lower the boat and the ship leans, it thuds against the side, the sound ringing out like a gunshot.
Amos and Tobey hasten their lowering, trying to get it down into the water before anyone comes to investigate the noise, but it’s too late.
As the boat slides down the ropes, the master emerges from below. He’s a terrible figure, haggard with days of unshaven beard, and an anxious look writ clear across his face, even in the dim moonlight. He knows about the mutiny— Amos can see it in his eyes. And he holds his right hand in the shadows behind himself, the master’s gun— an inherited privilege— concealed there.
“Trying to steal from me?” the master asks. It’s not really theft he’s worried about, nor money at all. It might have been that once, but now it’s simple fear for his own life. A mutiny, no matter what else came of it, would end in his death. And he, like everyone else on the whaleship, wants to come home alive, despite the odds and no matter what the cost. Amos pities him, if only for a second. Somehow, in the two years they’ve been together, he’s never found out if the master has a wife.
“No, sir,” Amos says, and he tries to keep his voice conciliatory, though he doesn’t know why he bothers. He’s still holding the ropes, lowering the boat down, red-handed. He’s trying to push disaster off one more second. He feels a strange sense of calm as he realizes what that means— that he’ll say and do anything to avoid the threat of the gun. He and the master are the same that way; afraid of the same thing.
But Tobey whirls, dropping his side of the rope and making the boat tilt crazily against the side. From where it rests at his feet, he picks up the hatchet. It glints in the moonlight.
The two of them have performed a different math, Amos realizes. Tobey sees the presence of the gun just as well as he does, and they’re both familiar with the way a Colt revolver loads— six shots. Even in the dark, even on a moving ship, Amos thinks at least one of those shots will strike true before Tobey can make it with the hatchet. And if he does kill the master— what is waiting for them on shore? The gallows, at best.
“Trying to kill me?” the master asks. “You’ll regret it.”
The master’s hand moves, and he aims the pistol squarely at Tobey. Amos lets go of the boat’s ropes and it splashes heavily into the water, banging hard against the side of the ship.
By now, there’s commotion below as the noise gets everyone out of bed— the officers and the steerage first, and then the foremast hands all running to see the conclusion of the play. It surely doesn’t take more than a second or so for the boat to slip down the ropes, but it feels like a lifetime. Time moves strangely in visions and dreams.
Amos steps in front of Tobey, and the master fires the gun. The bullet whistles somewhere over his head, past his left side— wherever it goes, it doesn’t hit. But the master is cocking the gun to fire again, and he won’t miss with the second shot. Tobey tries to run forward, but Amos grabs him by the arm and hauls him backwards, towards the rail.
The master shoots again. They dive off the side.
Marcus falls into the water. Even in the heat of the summer, the Atlantic is surprisingly cold, and his clothes billow around him, only his shirt trapped against his skin by the life jacket he’s wearing. It keeps his head above water during the momentary shock of submersion, but then he gains control of himself.
They want to climb into the boat, row it away from the ship, but when Amos tries to haul himself up, the master shoots again. He misses.
Even though he’s swimming in terror, grabbing Tobey who is a weaker swimmer than he is, he’s grateful that there’s no blood in the water. Not from a whale and not from either of them— he’s still scared of sharks.
There’s still three shots left in the gun, and the master has plenty of time to reload. There’s chaos on deck as someone yells to lower a boat to help them, but if a boat is lowered Amos doesn’t know. Tobey wrests himself free of his grip and swims away, as far as he can go. In the choppy waves, it’s all Amos can do to stay close to him, and keep his own head above water. The ship is lost from sight too quickly, vanishing into the darkness of the night, and the swell that lifts them up and drops them down in its hollows.
How long can a man swim? Amos wonders.
Marcus’s mouth is full of salt water, and he’s exhausted after a few scant minutes. He keeps crawling forward, the life jacket at least holding him at the surface of the water— he couldn’t dive if he wanted to. When the ocean lifts him high enough to see, the flash of white still lingers on the horizon, and he swims for it.
Amos and Tobey swim, too. The exhaustion is worse for them, malnourished and already overtired. And they swim for no reason other than to keep their heads above water, in the hope that some other passing whaleship or merchant vessel will come by and see them.
Sunlight is pulling its way up the horizon, pink and orange. Marcus, lifting his chin as much as he can, sees the tall spokes of a ship’s mast rising up over the water, towering white. But then it moves and turns, twisting, and he thinks it’s his own vision failing him, or the way he’s being shoved around by the waves, until the form resolves into a familiar shape, the flash of white on the horizon, as regular as a metronome.
The whale— though he knows it’s not a whale— he swims for it anyway, and keeps swimming until he arrives.
The water churns through a forest that towers above him, and it carries him through the endless array of windmills, all in perfect lines, their blades spinning. Their white blades catch the pink light of dawn, and they carve through the air with a low whumping sound.
He crashes into the base of one. It’s inhumanly large, so much so that he can’t see around it when he’s next to it— a wall of white. Up close, its pure white surface is grimy with barnacles and trash tangled up around it. He fumbles around it, the waves pushing him this way and that, threatening to snatch him away.
Amos and Tobey keep swimming. There, in the dawn light, they see something on the horizon. A spout of water, weak and feeble. It’s a whale— it really is. They swim for it, if only because a whale spouting on the horizon will bring boats from any ships that see it. It’s worth braving being close to it for that fraction of a chance, that signal flare.
But as they crest a wave and see it, it’s familiar to them. It’s the same whale they struck days ago, the one who has Amos’s iron still embedded in his side. He’s tangled in ropes, weakly drifting on the surface of the water, as barely alive as Amos and Tobey are. The whaleboat that he ran off with is still whole. It’s trapped against him in the web of rope, on its side, preventing him from diving.
When Amos and Tobey swim up to him and cling onto the ropes, grateful for the whale’s buoyancy— sperm whales float even after death, though this one is alive— it doesn’t make any attempt to shake them away. It’s perhaps too weak for even that.
Marcus scrapes his hands on the barnacles that festoon the windmill’s base, and the ocean slams him against its side again and again, making his head ring. He claws his way along it, a barnacle himself, looking for a way up.
Amos’s knife is still at his belt, the sailor’s knife with the first two inches cut off the blade. All it does is cut rope; it can’t be a weapon. He saws through the ropes, one after another, that trap the boat to the side of the whale. He doesn’t have enough breath to speak. Tobey clings to the underside of the boat, and as soon as it’s loose enough to turn, he tries to flip it over so that he can climb inside. It takes them both all their strength to get it free, and then they are so weak that they can barely haul themselves into it. They lay on the bottom of the whaleboat, gasping and alive, with the sun rising above them.
Marcus finds the ladder that he knew had to be on the windmill’s side. He pulls himself up, one hand over the other, until he reaches the tiny maintenance platform at the structure’s base. When he stands on it, he can see a great distance. Behind him, the forest of windmills stretches out impossibly far. They tower above him like cathedral spires, twirl like dancers. In the east, he sees a dot on the horizon— there’s the Whole Wide World .
Amos leans over the side of the whaleboat, knife in his hand. The whale is still there, still tangled in rope, turned partly on his side. His small, black eye is visible, following Amos’s knife. With the shortened blade, Amos does all that he can do: he cuts the whale free.