The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories (18 page)

In addition: three days ago, one of the mates fell from the bridge while repairing navigational equipment, and was buried without fanfare.

The result is such that our spirits, having momentarily lifted, are now deeply plunged. Annoyance and chagrin, the twin poles of our previous and collective emotional lives aboard the
Halcyon,
have given way to a disgruntled fatalism that no one is proud of and no one can shake. Thus far our expedition has amounted to this: we lanced a sick beast, boiled him down, and poured him back into the sand. Talk in the fo’c’sle is of a cursed voyage—the lingering stench of the dirwhal our unlucky, haunting talisman—but even as that superstition is passed around out of boredom and desperation, we know better. Years ago, someone discovered that the dirwhals crowding the Gulf could be rendered into usable energy, and made a fortune. After that, anyone who was able to scrape a shipper-tank together and get backing made his way to the sands. After that, expeditions became longer, to account for the travel time it took to reach new hunting grounds. Now, a generation later, anyone who puts on a sun-suit and stands for hours on deck like we do is forced to confront what Bushard has recently taken to calling the natural limit of optimism—as in, what’d we expect? The history of the world is the history of diminishing returns. You hunt something to the verge of extinction, it stays dead. It’s not a curse, it’s history getting the better of us; it’s simply time catching up.

Two days ago, someone taped up one of the Firstie leaflets on the back wall of the toilet-stall. It’s titled: “It’s Not Too Late to Take Responsibility for What You Are Doing.” It encourages us to return home and join their cause as spokespeople. There’s a contest going to see who can scrawl the most realistic-looking dick on it using only the letters provided.

“It does seem like something you wouldn’t want to wrap your mind around, doesn’t it?” Bushard said.

I asked him: Me in particular?

He shrugged, and gestured out the porthole to the empty sands, as if further proving a point that escaped me.

The plan, as far as it’s been explained to us, is to continue the expedition until either a full hold or a mechanical problem turns us around. The terrain has changed. The yellow sands have given way to more orangeish, and packed, dirt. It’s become noticeably hotter. Those who have been on hunts before are unsure whether we’ve gone beyond the pale, considering we are now outside of traditional hunting grounds altogether. “What pale?” Renaldo said at dinner tonight. “Were we ever even
in
the pale? Did I miss an important part of this expedition?”

“Dirwhals are people too,” someone said in a basso profundo voice. “Dirwhals. Are. People. Too.”

june 18

H
eavenly days:
a phrase my father took to saying on reflex when confronted with news he didn’t want to hear.
Heavenly days,
as he was cut from his logging job and moved us up north, trading one untenable situation for another.
Heavenly days,
as the rig was continually delayed.
Heavenly days,
when we woke up with half an inch of ice on the inside of the windows of our trailer, and my mother broke the glass trying to chip it off.
Heavenly days,
as the walls began to shrink and groan and we turned on him for his inability to see our situation for the thin soup it was: increasingly hopeless, wrecked, dead-ended, and dangerous.

He’d learned it from his father, who’d worked his whole life aboard a rig in the tar-sands until he was sent home with an evaporating pension and a breathing problem.
Heavenly days
. You say it right, it comes out as an expression caught somewhere between surprise and an acceptance of the inevitable—simultaneously the cushion to absorb the hammer blow, and the hammer blow itself.
We can’t stay here,
my sister whispered to me through a hole she’d cut in the partition that separated her space from mine. She’d been crying.
Something will happen, don’t worry,
I’d told you, because I could think of nothing else to say.

On account of the difficult terrain, Captain Tonker has limited the amount of ground the
Halcyon
covers on any given day. He’s split the crew into discrete units, each responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of one of the ship’s buggies. Every morning we’re sent out widely in different directions for recon; as we hit designated areas, we run shocks into the sand to see what turns up. Nothing ever does. This afternoon, we buggied so far out we lost sight of the
Halcyon
completely. “Would it be such a bad thing,” Renaldo said, after our third prong did nothing besides bring clods to the surface, “if we just drove this buggy home?”

When no one responded, he folded the map one of the mates had handed us into a small paper crane and flicked it into the basin. Then he apologized, and retrieved it.

Formally we’ve been told our supply of food will last another two years without restock; at our current budgeted fuel expenditure, we’re looking at another three. Four days ago, one of the engineers mentioned that the shipmaster at the loading dock had pleaded with Captain Tonker to leave some supplies for the rest of the fleet; his response had been to fire the engines and wave the guy off. Those of us in the bow are in caustic awe of the foresight evident in this display.

Tomorrow will mark the 150th anniversary of the first dirwhal sighting. At the urging of the second mate, the coopers have planned a comical reenactment of the scene, complete with sewn costumes and an impersonation of Captain Tonker, who was not there in body, but was in spirit. It’s more the
idea
of Captain Tonker, we’ve been told. A broad sketch. Someone has hand-drawn playbills and passed them around. The play will be called:
I Was There at the Beginning: An Industry Is Born.
Under the title, there’s a ferocious-looking dirwhal, drawn with human hands, holding the business end of a bomb-lance to its own head.

“I’m front row on this,” Renaldo said when he saw the bill.

“Save a seat for me,” Bushard replied.

june 19

T
uva: this afternoon, finally, I received your message. Is it the only one you’ve sent? Have you sent more, and have they been lost somewhere in the gulf that separates us now? In this message you asked if I remembered much about the time before we moved. Your only memory, you wrote, was of an afternoon at a public swimming pool that either you’d dreamed or had, in fact, existed on the first floor of our housing complex. We stood, the two of us, near the edge of the water. I’d been afraid to jump but said I would follow you, as soon as I saw it was safe. You didn’t know how to swim, but felt there wasn’t a choice in the matter: it was jump, or disappoint me. You jumped, and sank. Eventually the lifeguard pulled you out, sputtering and heaving for your own life. And when you opened your eyes, you saw that I hadn’t moved from the edge. Your question: was that something
I
remembered too?

I went to answer, but the line was down. One of the mates informed me that the telecomp was on a delay. It was impossible to say when your message had come in. My options were to either record something, and on the next signal it’d be sent out, or continue to stare at the machine, looking like the world had ended.

“You know those people who blame everyone else for their problems?” Bushard said later, when I complained to him about the state of our transmission equipment. “You’re those people.”

I asked him: Who else
should
I blame? He replied that at least I was in good company here in the fo’c’sle: our own iron den of inequity and complaint.

“Cry about it,” someone said, from the bow.

“That’s the spirit,” Bushard said back.

Last night I had a dream that rather than treading in wide circles, we were being pulled in a straight line across the desert by a cord that was visible only at night. The dark, sloping ridges in the distance shrank rather than grew as we approached. In my hands I held my visor and sun-suit, and was panicked to find myself topsides without my lance. I turned to someone I thought was Bushard, and was surprised to see it was you, Tuva, who had joined me on deck. You handed me a bowl of soup, and then another. My gratitude was overwhelming. As I went to thank you, you turned your head so I was unable to see anything but your hair and the side of your face. When I woke, I was weeping. Someone in the bow found this funny, and I stood, ready to pull whoever it was apart at the seams. It took four people including Bushard to calm me down.

july 7

T
hree weeks have passed since my last entry. There have been no further sightings of the Firsties, nor any evidence, anywhere, of dirwhals. We seem to be following a circuitous path conjured by a divining stick. The map of our progress—until someone finally pulled it down in frustration—resembled a fever dream drawn on an Etch A Sketch. The heat, as we’ve motored on, has become increasingly oppressive. When not on deck, we stand below in shifts directly in front of the cooling units, wicking the sweat from our bodies with towels nearly rancid from use. The engineers have expressed concern about wear on the injector cones, which haven’t been serviced since we left and cannot be now, considering that in order to even
see
them properly, the whole shipper-tank would have to be taken apart. As a result, the engine now hums at a pitch that is just shy of earsplitting if you stand near a vent. Periodically, the sound of metal grating metal shoots into the fo’c’sle with enough force to make those unlucky enough to not have remembered their plugs dizzy with nausea.

To the question of what our collective hopes are for the rest of this expedition, I’d say our answer is plain enough: we just want to get off the sand with what, after two years, we feel we’ve earned. We came here to do something very specific, and simple; something many have done before; and the fact that we still sit on an empty hold feels to us like the retraction of a promise, the very definition of unfairness. It’s a loaded deck, a cosmic rout of lousy timing. No one wants to be among the last ones on the sand, the suckers who stayed to turn out the lights.

“It’s a feeling,” Bushard has said, “I find impossible to describe.” He was sitting at a table in the galley, with his head in his hands.

Renaldo asked him: You mean that it’s happening, or that it’s happening to
us
?

He closed his eyes. “I’m going to stop talking to everyone aboard this ship,” he said.

august 2

T
uva, over the course of this expedition, I have come to understand what it is like to spend your life waiting for a rig that was never going to show. Time passes, the ship never comes in; at a certain point the ruined narrative solidifies, the hidden smallness and stupidity of your ambition presents itself in toto, and there you are: a walking avatar of foreclosed possibility. It’s a dark understanding that one day is there like a weight on your neck. But nothing is written, and there’s room for surprise. Opportunity can hulk itself from the dunes at the very moment you least expect it.

And today: the call on-deck sounded; our engines cut. We lined the port rail. The sun hit my visor like the idea of a headache spreading itself across the sand. I saw nothing. I asked what the commotion was about. Renaldo pointed.

In the far distance, a black speck. Then the sound of an engine. And then it hove more fully into view: a new model shipper-tank, outfitted with heat-reflective panels, a fly-bridge, and a full hull set atop a sleek, continuous track that made our own treads look like sand-churning windmills. As it came closer, however, it became apparent that all wasn’t well: one of their stacks was shredded, there were char marks up and down the iron sheeting on her wide bow. Someone had painted over the name of their ship, and scrawled a dripping
Homeward Bound
just below. The crew stood on deck, facing us. As they passed less than a hundred yards of sand separated us and we formed a brief mirror-image, a silent communion that was broken only when they finally signaled for a conversation between captains, and Tonker retired to his cabin to initiate the transmission.

They were not Firsties, that much was plain. A smell of biological mustiness carried on the wind registered immediately. “They’re riding low,” Tom said. In fact, they were struggling to push through the sand. “You think?” Renaldo said back. Bushard tried to yell across to the other ship, but was met with silence. Their sun-suits were white, and reflected the afternoon light. They looked like ghosts, hovering at the rail. “Happy ghosts,” someone said.

We stayed at the port rail, unmoving, for half an hour. Our new friends did the same. There was talk of disembarking on the buggies, but one of the mates hushed that idea before it took hold. Finally, with a lurch, our engines fired to life. The wheel was turned, and we made a slow arcing seventy-degree shift to the west. The stern of our sister ship gradually moved out of sight, her tremendous bridge winking a final time as it passed behind a low ridge of dunes. Captain Tonker explained later: the
Homeward Bound
had found an entire pod of dirwhals, and was returning home with a full hold. There had been trouble with the Firsties, the ship was on her last legs, but they would make it off the sand.

He continued: and they have given us a parting gift—the coordinates for their proven but unsanctioned ground.

Tuva: this is a gesture rarely made between the captains of shipper-tanks. Our hope is restored. We’ve been instructed to spruce up the buggies and ready our equipment. Along with Bushard and Renaldo, I’ve pulled an eight-hour shift in the high-hoops. All told we’ll be hoisted two hundred feet off-deck. As the stand was erected and we were strapped in, someone made a joke about the view. “Repeat that, please?” Bushard said.

“He said you look like three flags hoping to surrender,” Tom said.

“Tell him where to stand so it catches him in the face,” Renaldo said, as the motorized winch clenched and drew us heavenward.