The Weight of a Thousand Oceans

by Jillian Webster

  She shuffles forward, running her toe into a large bucket. It’s filled with water, still steaming hot. She leans in and smells the contents. It doesn’t smell like anything—certainly not the cleaning solution Lucas was using earlier. Next to it, her fingers fall upon a small towel resting on top of another empty bucket, and next to that, a dry woolen blanket.

  Lucas has left her something to wash herself.

  She dips her fingertips. It must have been boiling when he left it, knowing she wouldn’t get to it until after dinner. She falls to her knees, grasping the rim of the steaming bucket of water in disbelief. And then she holds her head in her hands and sobs.

  With shivering hands, she dips the towel into the water. Chills race up her spine. She wrings the cloth and leans her head back, draping it across her face. The warmth permeates her depleted body. She inhales the steam, holding the cloth until it cools. She dips again and again, tenderly wiping her tired and aching body, praying with each swipe erasing the filth that she could erase the memories as well.

  She cleans the dirt from under her nails. She wipes the grime from her feet. She leans her head over the bucket and washes her hair. Then she tiptoes back to her room and grabs her pack, which has somehow survived the storm. The dirty yet dry clothes she changes into are a small blessing. She has finally stopped shivering, leaving her aching muscles weak and depleted.

  She sneaks back into her nook and uses her wet towel to wipe the area clean before placing her new wool blanket inside. She then leaves her dirty towel next to the bucket inside the bathroom.

  When she returns the next night, the bucket and towel are gone.

  Thirty

  Lucas stands just outside Maia’s nook. A jumble of netting is piled at his feet as he readjusts and secures the crates. Maia rests quietly in her little cave, listening to him work. She reaches with a trembling hand and grabs hold of her curtain, hesitating briefly before letting go. Frustrated, she leans her head against the wall and rests her hand back in her lap. She has repeated this circus at least a half-dozen times now, grabbing the same section of curtain and working up the courage to say something to the man standing just outside and then backing out again.

  A heap of rattraps sit by the open door. The rats’ small, lifeless bodies dangle from the wooden slats with their necks flattened beneath the rusty brackets. Maia used to feel a small pang of guilt every time she heard a snap in the night, despite the fact that they have stolen her food, bit her, and been a general nuisance the entire time she has been down here. She grazes the tender wound on her shoulder. She’d cleaned it as best she could with the warm soapy rag, but needless to say, she doesn’t feel so guilty anymore.

  Before he leaves the basement, Lucas shovels the traps into a plastic bucket. A little while later, he returns, placing empty traps back beneath the shelves. Maia can hear him fiddling with something, standing just outside her nook. Her heart pounding, she grabs the blanket again and slowly peels it back. She looks up at him standing just a few feet away. His hands inside a crate, he stops what he is doing but does not return her gaze.

  “Lucas,” she whispers.

  He glances over his shoulder, eyeing the open door in an obvious way, and then turns to her with a blatant look of disapproval. As their eyes meet, a look of pity falls over him.

  Maia’s eyes well in tears. “Thank you,” she whispers.

  As he stares at her, his gaze softens and his shoulders drop. He sighs. “You’re welcome.” He looks back at the open door. As Maia closes the curtain, he whispers, “Wait—”

  She peers back out to find him looking down at her with an uncertain, almost pained look across his face. He rushes to close the door and shoves a small wooden block beneath. Plucking a step stool from between the shelves, he places it around the corner and pulls down a crate. He grabs a small rectangular package from inside and steps next to her, crouching down so they are face to face.

  Maia eyes the package, then watches him, now sitting so close she could reach out and touch him.

  He looks at the packaging in his hands, shaking his head. “You are going to The Old Arctic Circle,” he says with concern as he looks her over.

  “Yes.”

  “Uh-huh.” He shakes his head. “You will never make it,” he adds in his thick accent.

  Her heart sinks. “Why do you say that?”

  “Eat these. They are calorie-dense biscuits,” he says, still eyeing her. “It’s taking us a while longer … the weather … it is so unpredictable. No matter how many books I read, they are all outdated and irrelevant.” He waves his hand as if getting off topic. “I said I wouldn’t get involved. I cannot imagine why Davies would agree to smuggle a woman on board. You must have given him an offer he could not refuse.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “It does not matter. I am not involved. I won’t be any part of this.” He stands, handing her the package of biscuits. “I just cannot look the other way as you starve to death, knowing that these are here. There—” He points towards the crate he pulled them from. “They are just there. You found them yourself. Be careful to resecure the netting and don’t eat too many at once.”

  He returns the crate under the netting then heads for the door.

  “Lucas?” Maia crawls out from her curtain.

  He stops, pausing for a moment before turning around to face her.

  “I’m Maia.”

  He looks down and nods his head, then turns and leaves the room.

  Maia huddles in the dark, contentedly eating her biscuits and a small plate of food from Davies. It’s been weeks since her last conversation with Lucas. The dense biscuits made her empty stomach feel sick at first, but now she happily packs them in with her meals, two or three at a time.

  After a few weeks, precious weight and vitality slowly trickle back into her system. The once protruding bones soften beneath her skin. She feels like herself again. With the strength to restart her daily routine, she takes a wild guess at how many notches she’s missed and carves them into the wood. She whispers to her grandfather again and stretches in the pitch black while she says her prayers. Her biggest source of gratitude is now the very thing that initially caused her grief. Time. Time to put on weight. Time to prepare. Time to pull herself back together before she is on her own again.

  That’s the thing about the human spirit, what one can endure in the face of great hardship. She’s stood at the doorway of death and has come back again with a resolve stronger than ever to make it to The Old Arctic Circle.

  One morning, as Maia lay in her nook with her curtain slightly opened, she stares at the sky outside the basement window as a seagull swoops past. She saw it, didn’t she? Did she? For the rest of that afternoon, she watches for the bird—seagulls are usually an indicator of nearby land—but she doesn’t spot another. She begins to wonder whether she’d seen one at all. Seagull or not, the thought of spotting a bird rekindles her faith that hopefully, someday soon, they will be close to land. It has to be close. It has to be.

  Sunday afternoons are a time for drinking. And generally playing cards, Maia imagines. The men often participate in something that induces long periods of silence or speaking soft enough for her to barely hear anything. But with the passage of time and alcohol, the sailors grow more and more boisterous. There are generally loud bangs and yelling, followed by cursing and laughter.

  The afternoon passes as Maia listens to the men playing in the room above. She strains to pick out Lucas’s accented voice. A few times she can hear him laugh alongside these criminals, and she wonders about him. Most Sundays are like this. She recognizes the men’s different voices now, making up faces and names and backgrounds to go along with each.

  An object in the ocean drags along the outside of the boat. The pressure from it pushing against the ship creates a loud screech, followed by sporadic thumps and bangs. Whatever is below, the boat is slowly pushing through it like sludge. This outside commotion has been happening with increasing frequency the la
st few days and this one is particularly loud. It starts from the front of the ship and slowly makes its way towards Maia’s window. She waits in anticipation with her gaze fixated on the glass.

  A long plastic rod appears, wrapped in a bright blue net hanging from it like a curtain. Trapped in the weave, along with a few plastic bags and seaweed, is a dying fish. Maia watches in horror as it hovers into view, its mouth and gills gaping as it is shoved against the glass.

  Without thinking, Maia rips open her curtain and runs towards the window. She climbs the shelving and slaps her hand against the glass. She has never seen a fish so big; it must be the length of her arm. Tangled and gasping, it slowly slides past, suffocating in the open air. A dying fish. What a waste in an ocean almost completely void of them.

  Then the view from the window is left unhindered, and the horror of what Maia sees washes over her.

  Thirty-One

  The once pristine, vast blue ocean is now an endless blanket of waste. Layers of sludge drift between the infinite scraps of plastic, half-submerged buckets, doll heads, debris, netting, bins, bags, and bottles. The boat continues to shove through the mountains of rubbish like a sledge through ice, the layers so thick they blanket the water as if it were land. Maia grips the wooden shelf with one hand as her other slowly covers her mouth. A tear runs down her cheek.

  She climbs up another shelf and peers over the ledge of the window. As far as she can see, massive islands of condensed trash float between a chunky soup of plastic. The thick blanket of pollution has smothered any hope of blue, leaving an endless woven expanse of gray. Rain threatens from the dark clouds. A drop splats against the window.

  Birds walk along the more consolidated surfaces, picking and jabbing their beaks through the decay. With their heads lowered, they squawk and charge after one another, claiming their territory over the offal. A smaller bird stumbles and trips on top of a mound. Its leg bound by a clear ring of some sort, it drags more rubbish behind it like a ball and chain.

  The ship has moved beyond the broken rod of plastic. Maia can see it extending from the trash just beyond the edge of their boat. The fish hanging from the nets has stopped moving. Anger swirls from within her gut.

  “Pretty horrific, yes?”

  Maia loses her footing and swings off the crates. Her hand grips the shelf just long enough to brace her fall and she stumbles to her feet.

  Lucas stands before her, fighting back a smile. “Maia…”

  “I’m sorry, I just…” She straightens her top. “Where are we?”

  Lucas shoves the wooden block beneath the closed door. Maia’s heart skips a beat.

  “We passed the old Hawaiian Islands a few days ago.” He walks up next to her. “I had a feeling we’d run into this.” His voice is hushed with a hint of liquor on his breath.

  She backs into a shelf. “Into … what?”

  “They used to call it the … how do you say … The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The ocean currents were different back then—stronger. They pushed garbage that was dumped from the land into these massive piles in the middle of the ocean. A hundred years ago, it was mostly only little disintegrated pieces of plastic. Once the piled garbage became thousands of miles across, our ancestors made big programs to clean them. But they were not fast enough compared to the millions of tons of rubbish from all over the world going into the oceans every second.”

  “Every … every second?”

  He grabs the crates and steps onto the first shelf, peering out of the window. He grimaces. “Then the oceans rose. Cities all over the world slowly drowned under the incoming water and more garbage leaked into the ocean.” He jumps back down. “And then you know the rest.” He circles his hands and his head in an on-and-on-it-goes sort of manner. “Storm surges and tsunamis and king tides destroyed whatever coastal regions were left and the oceans were obliterated with debris. This is just what you can see; it goes as far deep as it is wide. The bottom of the ocean is covered with mountains of garbage. It just layers on top of itself. The currents are slower now, but they still pile the rubbish in the middle. Davies initially tried to sail around it, thinking it would damage his boat. But it takes too long to go around. We’ve tried before but it was a waste of time. It just seems to never end. So, we just slow the boat way down and push our way through.”

  Maia looks up at the window, fighting against the anger swelling within. “I’ve spent my whole life walking among our ancestor’s decaying structures and rubbish.” An incensed heat burns across her cheeks. “I resent it.” She looks up at him. “I resent everything about it. It makes me feel deeply alone … abandoned.”

  “Well, you are—we all are. We are the ones left behind, Maia. We are the forgotten ones.” He gazes down at her and for once she can no longer see resentment or pity in his eyes, but something else entirely.

  “You look…” He nods his head and a smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. “You don’t look … so bad.”

  A smile spreads across her face, surprising her. “I want to thank you, Lucas. Again. For everything.”

  He looks down at her with a kindness in his eyes she’s never seen before. And then his smile fades. He backs up. “I should go. You should hide. You shouldn’t be out in daylight. This is dangerous.”

  He turns to leave and Maia grabs his arm. “Sailing where?”

  “Excuse me?” He turns to face her, standing once again within inches of her face.

  She fights the urge to step back. “You said Davies sails around the garbage. Sails around … to where?”

  “You want to know if we are sailing to The Old Arctic Circle.”

  “Are you?”

  He hesitates.

  “Please tell me it’s not a myth.”

  He takes a step back and grabs a shelf as he looks out the window. “No … no, it’s not a myth.”

  She smiles.

  “Before you get excited … we do not go to The Old Arctic Circle. Our ship is banned. People like us—people like Davies … We are pirates, Maia.”

  “Pirates.”

  “We are businessmen. We follow our own rules.”

  “You’re criminals.”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “You sure don’t act like a criminal.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You’ve protected me.”

  He winces. “No, I haven’t.”

  “You’ve left me food and blankets and you set up rat—”

  “I’ve done things.”

  “Have you killed anyone?”

  “No.”

  “Raped?”

  “No. But that doesn’t mean—”

  “Okay, well, I don’t need to know. If we aren’t going to The Old Arctic Circle, then where are we going?”

  “Next stop is the West Coast of the United States. I assume that is where Davies will have you get off.”

  “Right. Close enough.”

  “Not really.”

  “Closer than I was before. That’s all that matters.”

  He looks at her incredulously, almost amused. It seems he wants to ask her something. As she waits for his reply, her focus lingers on his lips and she suddenly realizes she wants more than just a response. What is it about this man? She looks into his eyes as it dawns on her that she is quite captivated by this Lucas. And by the way he is looking at her, it’s possible he feels the same.

  “Maia, your eyes…” He steps closer.

  “…the fuck?”

  Lucas and Maia whip around to find a man standing alone at the open door, the wooden block from beneath now dangling in his hand. A sinister grin spreads wide across his lips.

  Thirty-Two

  “Well, well, well … looky looky what we have here,” the man sings loudly. His rasping voice booms through the small storage space. As he scuffles towards them, his soiled boots flop against the ground. He looks Maia up and down, licking his lips between a mostly toothless grin.

  “Bode…” Lucas steps between them with his hand he
ld out. The man’s robust body towers over him. “It’s not what you think,” Lucas says sternly.

  “Like hell it’s not. Here I am, coming down to help you and you’re off fucking some little stowaway.”

  “I am not—por favor, please, let us talk about this.”

  “Oooo! She’s a goodie, too. Look at her!” Bode yells.

  Lucas flinches and glances back at the open door.

  Bode pushes up his sleeves as he takes another step. “Oh, this is going to be fun.” He kicks off his boots. “You know the rules, Lucas, we share these ones. Don’t want to create animosity.”

  Maia grabs Lucas’s arm and steps behind him. Her heart racing, she glances towards her nook. Where is her knife?

  Lucas keeps his hand out towards the man. “Don’t do this.”

  “Fuck you.” Bode reaches around Lucas and snatches Maia’s arm, aggressively pulling her into him.

  Maia reaches for something—Lucas, a shelf, anything—but her toes barely touch the floor as Bode lifts her from the ground. Grabbing her by the shoulders, he lifts her up so they are face to face. “You’re coming with me.” His offensive breath hits her like a wrecking ball.

  Lucas tries to pull her away and Bode shoves him hard against the crates. Maia drops to the ground.

  Bode heaves her out of the room, sending her tumbling across the floor. She grapples to her feet and runs towards the stairs but Bode grabs her hair and yanks her back to the ground. “C’mon now, no use putting up a fuss.” He lifts her off the floor like a rag doll.

  Lucas jumps on Bode’s back and wraps his arm around his neck. Bode arches back. Still holding tightly onto Maia, all three fall to the ground.

  Lucas tightens his forearm around Bode’s neck. “Let go.”