“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
Tuva: 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
Three 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
Tuva, 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.
The view from the hoops was staggering. I could see the sloping vanishing point of the sand in all directions, as if someone had gently pressured the horizon into a rounded dome that didn’t so much meet the sky as push into it. The sound from engines below didn’t reach our ears; their churning presence was apparent only in the vibration carried on the stilts between our legs. Everywhere I turned, the granulated vista appeared both limitless and small. In my happiness to find myself where I was, I reached for my notes and accidentally dropped my binoculars. They fell to the deck like a shot-down plane.
“Good Lord,” Renaldo said. “Is there anything you can’t do?”
august 18
Sighted over the last two weeks: fourteen spent lance casings; two sliding holes in the sand, which were speckled and strewn with sun-hardened biological matter; one burned-out buggy that after brief inspection was determined to belong to the Firsties; three discarded sun-suits; various instruments used to measure deep-sand activity; and a collapsible reflective tent.
We are now treading in a straight line to the west, following the coordinates we’ve been given, and moving well away from what could be called even substandard hunting conditions. The sand sits atop a stratum of irregular rock formations, glacier-cut a millennium ago, which in segments have been exposed and balded by the wind, the presence of which is in itself a novelty, considering the overall stillness of the Gulf. Two days ago we woke to a silent engine and a sound like waves crashing on the hull only to be told we were in the middle of a windstorm; when it was over, and the engines were fired once more, the sand-drift had climbed to the portholes on the starboard side. The extra care we are taking with our navigation has made our progress feel incremental.
If not for the evidence so plain in front of us, we would surely be demoralized. But it seems that every time one of us is ready to admit that we perhaps have been led astray by some cruel practical joke played on one captain by another, a call comes in from the hoops or the buggies that points undeniably to the aftermath of a successful hunt as well as a confrontation between shipper-tanks. All crew on deck have been ordered to remain within spitting distance of a loaded bomb-lance at all times.
Bushard’s mood has soured dramatically since our encounter with Homeward Bound. This morning he asked me if he was alone in thinking that what we were doing was, perhaps when all was said and done, a bad idea. When I asked him what he meant, he said: the whole picture—the pursuit of finite resources, the Firsties, the families hoarding their wealth in the southern biospheres, the burning wheel of industry, our participation in it. I told him that as long as I could remember I’d been too busy regretting what hadn’t happened to think much about what might. From where I was standing, at least we were going somewhere. He looked at me as if I’d missed the point. I asked him: try again.
“Never mind,” he said, and walked away.
august 20
This morning, we sighted two desiccated and partially blown-open dirwhal carcasses. In their state of decomposition, we were unable to tell their genus. Everyone, as we’ve pushed farther on, has grown antsy, agitated. The sand is waffled with deep and veering tread-tracks. It’s increasingly clear that whatever went on here was less a deliberate lancing and more of an indiscriminate unleashing of explosives. We’ve been sent out in buggies for exploratory pronging, but none of those trips have turned anything to the surface.
“It’s a dead end,” Tom said at lunch. He was pushing the food on his plate into little mounds. “They’ve bombed everything out of the sand.”
“Everything they could see out of the sand,” someone said back.
After dinner, Captain Tonker called for an all-hands assembly at the stern to tell us that within four days we would reach our destination, and in order to be fully prepared he would be pulling down the high-hoops and clearing the deck of all debris not directly related to rendering. In addition, all but two of the buggies would be lashed to the interior rail until further notice. For those of us who didn’t follow, it was explained to us that all lancing would occur from the deck of the Halcyon. What the captain of Homeward Bound had shared with him was that less than twenty-five miles away from where we stood now was a naturally occurring cove in the sand, ringed by tall ridges of rock. It would be there, if anywhere, that we would find what we were looking for, and our plan is a s
imple one: park ourselves in the mouth of the cove, juice the prongs, and fire as the beasts revealed themselves trying to escape.
“Easy as that?” someone behind me said.
“Easy as that,” was Captain Tonker’s reply.
august 29
Tuva: it brings me no pleasure to write that either the information provided by Homeward Bound was faulty, or we have, somewhere, somehow, veered off course. After four days, we saw nothing but hard sand in all directions. On the fifth day, Tonker ordered all buggies to resume patrols to the west and south of our current position. This morning, one of the engineers reported that the injectors had slipped their casing, and were now chafing against the lug-valves, which, considering those valves had already been sheered from continuous use, spelled a problem if we were at all interested in getting home. When asked how large a problem, he shrugged and spread his arms, as if measuring a large box he couldn’t quite reach around. One of the mates asked him if he was sure. “I might be,” he replied, then disappeared back into the engine room.
Further complication: while on a short recon patrol, one of the buggy crews has had a run-in with a group of Firsties, the first we’ve seen in months. As I write, they are on their way back to the ship with two of them. Either the Firsties had been on foot, or had left their own buggy camouflaged somewhere in the sand. The good news: we’re convinced they can tell us something we don’t know about the location of this cove, and their encounter with Homeward Bound. The bad news: lurking somewhere close is the rest of their crew.
Renaldo was on a different buggy, which, in light of the contact made, was called back. He reported there was nothing, absolutely nothing on the surface to see. The buggy carrying the captured Firsties is expected to arrive two hours from now.
The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories Page 17