by Adam Johnson
“You know,” I said, the shape of him in my home so perfect in its incongruity it would become the image I returned to most after he was gone, a quiet death. Every wrinkle in his plaid snap-up shirt, the hint of jagged yellow tooth, the eyes defenseless and at once every color of green, “I always wanted you to be my lover.”
“I knew.” His cheeks reddened under long grey lashes. “But it’s better this way.”
“Better,” I said, nodding into my wine. I had no idea whether or not I believed it. The hands of the clock above the fireplace drew themselves over its oiled oak face.
CLAUDIA RANKINE
“You are in the dark, in the car . . .”
FROM Citizen
/
You are in the dark, in the car, watching the black-tarred street being swallowed by speed; he tells you his dean is making him hire a person of color when there are so many great writers out there.
You think maybe this is an experiment and you are being tested or retroactively insulted or you have done something that communicates this is an okay conversation to be having.
Why do you feel okay saying this to me? You wish the light would turn red or a police siren would go off so you could slam on the brakes, slam into the car ahead of you, be propelled forward so quickly both your faces would suddenly be exposed to the wind.
As usual you drive straight through the moment with the expected backing off of what was previously said. It is not only that confrontation is headache producing; it is also that you have a destination that doesn’t include acting like this moment isn’t inhabitable, hasn’t happened before, and the before isn’t part of the now as the night darkens and the time shortens between where we are and where we are going.
/
When you arrive in your driveway and turn off the car, you remain behind the wheel another ten minutes. You fear the night is being locked in and coded on a cellular level and want time to function as a power wash. Sitting there staring at the closed garage door you are reminded that a friend once told you there exists a medical term—John Henryism—for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the build up of erasure. Sherman James, the researcher who came up with the term, claimed the physiological costs were high. You hope by sitting in silence you are bucking the trend.
/
When the stranger asks, Why do you care? you just stand there staring at him. He has just referred to the boisterous teenagers in Starbucks as niggers. Hey, I am standing right here, you responded, not necessarily expecting him to turn to you.
He is holding the lidded paper cup in one hand and a small paper bag in the other. They are just being kids. Come on, no need to get all KKK on them, you say.
Now there you go, he responds.
The people around you have turned away from their screens. The teenagers are on pause. There I go? you ask, feeling irritation begin to rain down. Yes, and something about hearing yourself repeating this stranger’s accusation in a voice usually reserved for your partner makes you smile.
/
A man knocked over her son in the subway. You feel your own body wince. He’s okay, but the son of a bitch kept walking. She says she grabbed the stranger’s arm and told him to apologize: I told him to look at the boy and apologize. And yes, you want it to stop, you want the black child pushed to the ground to be seen, to be helped to his feet and be brushed off, not brushed off by the person that did not see him, has never seen him, has perhaps never seen anyone who is not a reflection of himself.
The beautiful thing is that a group of men began to stand behind me like a fleet of bodyguards, she says, like newly found uncles and brothers.
/
The new therapist specializes in trauma counseling. You have only ever spoken on the phone. Her house has a side gate that leads to a back entrance she uses for patients. You walk down a path bordered on both sides with deer grass and rosemary to the gate, which turns out to be locked.
At the front door the bell is a small round disc that you press firmly. When the door finally opens, the woman standing there yells, at the top of her lungs, Get away from my house. What are you doing in my yard?
It’s as if a wounded Doberman pinscher or a German shepherd has gained the power of speech. And though you back up a few steps, you manage to tell her you have an appointment. You have an appointment? she spits back. Then she pauses. Everything pauses. Oh, she says, followed by, oh, yes, that’s right. I am sorry.
I am so sorry, so, so sorry.
/
PAUL TOUGH
A Speck in the Sea
FROM The New York Times Magazine
LOOKING BACK, John Aldridge knew it was a stupid move. When you’re alone on the deck of a lobster boat in the middle of the night, forty miles off the tip of Long Island, you don’t take chances. But he had work to do: He needed to start pumping water into the Anna Mary’s holding tanks to chill, so that when he and his partner, Anthony Sosinski, reached their first string of traps a few miles farther south, the water would be cold enough to keep the lobsters alive for the return trip. In order to get to the tanks, he had to open a metal hatch on the deck. And the hatch was covered by two thirty-five-gallon Coleman coolers, giant plastic insulated ice chests that he and Sosinski filled before leaving the dock in Montauk harbor seven hours earlier. The coolers, full, weighed about 200 pounds, and the only way for Aldridge to move them alone was to snag a box hook onto the plastic handle of the bottom one, brace his legs, lean back and pull with all his might.
And then the handle snapped.
Suddenly Aldridge was flying backward, tumbling across the deck toward the back of the boat, which was wide open, just a flat, slick ramp leading straight into the black ocean a few inches below. Aldridge grabbed for the side of the boat as it went past, his fingertips missing it by inches. The water hit him like a slap. He went under, took in a mouthful of Atlantic Ocean and then surfaced, sputtering. He yelled as loud as he could, hoping to wake Sosinski, who was asleep on a bunk below the front deck. But the diesel engine was too loud, and the Anna Mary, on autopilot, moving due south at six and a half knots, was already out of reach, its navigation lights receding into the night. Aldridge shouted once more, panic rising in his throat, and then silence descended. He was alone in the darkness. A single thought gripped his mind: This is how I’m going to die.
Aldridge was forty-five, a fisherman for almost two decades. Most commercial fishermen in Montauk were born to the work, the sons and sometimes the grandsons of Montauk fishermen. But Aldridge was different—he chose fishing in his mid-twenties, moving east on Long Island from the suburban sprawl where he grew up to be closer to something that felt real to him. He found work on a dragger and then on a lobster boat, and then, in 2006, he bought the Anna Mary with Sosinski, his best friend since grade school. Now they had a thriving business, 800 traps sitting on the bottom of the Atlantic, and two times a week they’d take the boat out overnight, spend an eighteen-hour day hauling in their catch and return the next morning to Montauk loaded down with lobster and crab.
Sosinski had a reputation on the docks as a fun-loving loudmouth, a bit of a clown—he actually rode a unicycle—but Aldridge was the opposite: quiet, intense, determined. Work on the Anna Mary was physically demanding, and Aldridge, who was lean but strong, drew a sense of accomplishment, even pride, in how much he was able to endure each trip—how long he could keep working without sleep, how many heavy traps he pulled out of the water, how quickly and precisely he and Sosinski were able to unload them, restock them with bait and toss them back in. Now, alone in the water, he tried to use that strength to push down the fear that was threatening to overtake him. No negative thoughts, he told himself. Stay positive. Stay strong.
The first thing you’re supposed to do, if you’re a fisherman and you fall in the ocean, is to kick off your boots. They’re dead weight that will pull you down. But as Aldridge treaded water, he realized that his boots were not pulling him down;
in fact, they were lifting him up, weirdly elevating his feet and tipping him backward. Aldridge’s boots were an oddity among the members of Montauk’s commercial fishing fleet: thick green rubber monstrosities that were guaranteed to keep your feet warm down to minus fifty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature Montauk had not experienced since the ice age. Sosinski made fun of the boots, but Aldridge liked them: they were comfortable and sturdy and easy to slip on and off. And now, as he bobbed in the Atlantic, he had an idea of how they might save his life.
Treading water awkwardly, Aldridge reached down and pulled off his left boot. Straining, he turned it upside down, raised it up until it cleared the waves, then plunged it back into the water, trapping a boot-size bubble of air inside. He tucked the inverted boot under his left armpit. Then he did the same thing with the right boot. It worked; they were like twin pontoons, and treading water with his feet alone was now enough to keep him stable and afloat.
The boots gave Aldridge a chance to think. He wasn’t going to sink—not right away, anyway. But he was still in a very bad situation. He tried to take stock: It was about 3:30 a.m. on July 24, a clear, starry night lit by a full moon. The wind was calm, but there was a five-foot swell, a remnant of a storm that blew through a couple of days earlier. The North Atlantic water was chilly—seventy-two degrees—but bearable, for now. Dawn was still two hours away. Aldridge set a goal, the first of many he would assign himself that day: Just stay afloat till sunrise.
Once the sun came up, Aldridge knew, someone was bound to start searching for him, and he could begin to look for something bigger and more stable to hold on to. For now, though, there was nothing to do but scan the horizon for daylight and watch the water for predators. For the first hour, the sea life mostly left him alone. But then, in the moonlight, he saw two shark fins circling him, less than ten feet away—blue sharks, they looked like, 350 pounds or so. Aldridge pulled his buck knife out of his pocket, snapped it open and gripped it tightly, ready to slash or stab if the sharks tried to attack. Eventually, though, they swam away, and Aldridge was alone again, rising and falling with the ocean’s swell. He kept trying to drive away those negative thoughts, but he couldn’t help it: Who would get his apartment if he didn’t make it back? Who would take care of his dog? He thought about fisherman friends who died, funerals he’d been to at St. Therese, the Catholic church in Montauk. He thought about who would come to his own funeral if he didn’t make it.
But mostly he thought about his family back in Oakdale, the Long Island town where he grew up: his parents, who had been married for almost fifty years and still lived in the house where Aldridge was born; his brother; his sister; his little nephew, Jake. It was a close-knit, middle-class, Italian-and-Irish family. His father was retired from the Oldsmobile dealership in Queens where he commuted to work for decades. Aldridge pictured them all, asleep in their beds, and thought about the phone calls they would soon be getting.
His family didn’t bring it up much anymore, but Aldridge knew that none of them liked the fact that he had taken up such a dangerous profession. In his twenties, when he was starting out as a fisherman, his parents were constantly trying to talk him out of it. They gave up, eventually, but even now, every time he said goodbye to his mother, she looked at him as if it were the last time she was going to see him.
Alone in the darkness, he remembered a conversation he had a few months earlier with his sister, over beers in her backyard. They were talking about a friend of Aldridge’s named Wallace Gray, a fisherman who drowned off Cape Cod when his scallop boat sank in bad weather. It wasn’t a very cheerful conversation, and they both knew that they weren’t talking only about Gray. Out of nowhere, Aldridge felt compelled to make his sister a promise: If I ever get into trouble out there, he told her, just know that I’m going to do everything I can to get back home.
It was a little after 6 a.m. when Anthony Sosinski woke up onboard the Anna Mary. The mate he and Aldridge hired to work this particular trip, an old friend named Mike Migliaccio, got up first, and when he saw that Aldridge was missing, he yelled for Sosinski. They were both sleep-dazed, confused by the daylight. What time was it? Where were they? Sosinski tried to puzzle it out: Just before he went to sleep at 9 p.m., he told Aldridge to wake him at 11:30 p.m. Now it was past dawn. Even if Aldridge had decided to let him sleep (as he sometimes did), surely he would have woken Sosinski by the time they got to their first trawl. But they were more than fifteen miles past their traps—almost sixty miles offshore. What could have happened?
The Anna Mary is a forty-five-foot boat, and most of its surface is taken up by a flat, open deck, so there aren’t that many places to search for a missing person. Still, Sosinski and Migliaccio looked everywhere. One hatch cover on the deck was off, and Sosinski thought maybe Aldridge had fallen into the open lobster tank, hit his head and drowned. He lay facedown on the deck and stuck his head through the hatch, ignoring the powerful smell. No sign of Aldridge.
Sosinski ran to the VHF radio, which was bolted to the ceiling in the small wheelhouse toward the front of the boat, and grabbed the microphone. He switched to channel sixteen, the distress channel, and at 6:22 a.m., he called for help, his voice shaking: “Coast Guard, this is the Anna Mary. We’ve got a man overboard.”
The Coast Guard’s headquarters for Long Island and coastal Connecticut is in New Haven. Sean Davis is a petty officer there, and it was his job that morning to stand watch at the station’s communications unit. Davis was part of a five-person watch that had just come on duty. Davis radioed back, asking Sosinski for details, and Sosinski started feeding them to him: when he last saw Aldridge, the course the boat was on, where they were now. No, Aldridge wasn’t wearing a life preserver. No, he wasn’t wearing a G.P.S. distress beacon. No, he didn’t leave a note. Yes, he could swim.
Davis asked Sosinski to stand by, and he turned to the rest of the team in the command center, a dimly lit room on the second floor of the base. The front wall was covered with maps and charts and video screens, which could show everything from a live radar image of Long Island Sound to the local news. Sitting nearest to Davis was Pete Winters, a Coast Guard veteran who was now working as a civilian search-and-rescue controller. That morning, he was the Operations Unit watch stander, which would normally mean that he’d be the person running the search-and-rescue computers. On this morning, though, there was a second person in the Operations Unit: Jason Rodocker, a petty officer who that week was “breaking in,” or being trained. Rodocker was new to Long Island Sound—he had just transferred two days earlier from the Coast Guard station in Baltimore. But as it happened, he was an expert in the Coast Guard’s search-and-rescue computer program, known as Sarops.
The first calculation the search team ran that morning was a survival simulation, taking into account Aldridge’s height (5-9) and weight (150 pounds), plus the weather and water temperature. It told them that the longest Aldridge could likely stay afloat before hypothermia took over and his muscles gave out was nineteen hours. But that, they knew, was a best case. The reality was that very few people survived more than three or four hours in the North Atlantic, especially without a flotation device.
By 6:28, the command center had notified the search mission commander in New Haven, Jonathan Theel, and the search coordinator at the district headquarters in Boston, who would have to approve the use of any aircraft in the search. At 6:30, Davis issued a universal distress call on channel sixteen: “Pan pan. Pan pan. Pan pan,” he intoned, the international maritime code for an urgent broadcast. “This is United States Coast Guard Sector Long Island Sound. The Coast Guard has received a report of a man overboard off the fishing vessel Anna Mary, south of Montauk, between five and sixty miles offshore. All mariners are requested to keep a sharp lookout.”
Davis kept working the radio. He contacted the Coast Guard station in Montauk with instructions to launch whatever boats were available. Boston approved the use of two helicopters and a search plane, and Davis radioed Air Station
Cape Cod and told them to get airborne as soon as possible. The closest Coast Guard cutter, an eighty-seven-footer called the Sailfish, was in New York Harbor, and Davis directed its crew to start heading east.
Rodocker, meanwhile, was manning the computer. The Coast Guard has used computer simulations in search and rescue since the mid-1970s, but Sarops has been in use since only 2007. At its heart is a Monte Carlo-style simulator that can generate, in just a few minutes, as many as 10,000 points to represent how far and in what direction a “search object" might have drifted. Operators input a variety of data, from the last known location of a lost mariner to the ocean currents and wind direction. Sarops then creates a map of a search area—in this case, of the ocean south of Montauk—with colored squares representing each potential location for the search object. Red and orange squares represent the most likely locations; gray squares represent the least likely.
The challenge in Aldridge’s case was that the search team had no clear idea when—and therefore where—he fell overboard. It might have been five minutes after Sosinski went to sleep, or it might have been five minutes before he woke up. That created a potential search area the size of Rhode Island, a sweep of ocean thirty miles wide, starting at the Montauk lighthouse and extending sixty miles south. This was a big problem: In contrast to the sophisticated algorithms of Sarops, the Coast Guard’s basic searching technique is a low-tech one—human beings staring at the ocean, looking for a person’s head bobbing in the waves. An 1,800-square-mile search area would be almost impossible to cover.