by Mark Ellis
As the light of the city changed, there was the mournful boom of a big freighter in the concrete harbor. Out his window the obelisks of Manhattan made a civilization still more alive than his fallen Soviet Union. But the old father and husband felt himself part of something being slowly transformed. Gone was the oddly comforting life he and his now-fellow Americans had lived during the Cold War. Some new, more ill-defined struggle was taking its place.
He rose from the table to turn on more lights. It was his place to live out his life quietly. He had only his Ukrainian Orthodox Church now. He would go every Sunday as long as he was able.
And he had Lara’s things—belongings that had meant little to her when she flew the nest and that meant everything to him now. Among them were a few school-age drawings from Russia, including one of a small girl-child and an adult male waving from the deck of a gray ship. He’d kept most of the children’s books he’d read to her after Dounia died. And the first letter Lara had written from Seattle.
Dear Papa,
I’m all settled in my apartment and wanted to take a minute for a few lines. My roommate, Ali, is from Boston, and so far, she seems really nice.
I do hope you’re not too lonely today, with me gone. I’ll be seeing you soon, after Christmas, when the airports aren’t so jammed. I will book the flight with the money you sent as soon as I know my finals schedule.
I just wanted you to know that since coming here, I’ve realized that this was the right move for me, even though I miss you terribly. I can’t ask you to uproot your own life and come here but know that I would welcome that. In the meantime, I feel the strength of a rich vein of progressivism waiting to be mined, the way our revolutionist founders intended it.
My place is here in the West, where this continent reaches out and almost touches our own. With the writing skills I learned in our Big Apple, and hope to develop here, I will lend my voice to the great anthology of the future.
I believe you will live to see the beginning.
Take care, Papa.
Love, Lara
Melissa sat at her desk, her fingers pressing in circular motions against her temples. Late August, and the Space Needle was wet with a first rain, the metropolitan lawns thirsty and the streets made slick. The offices of Charon were quiet. It would be awhile before a case like Lara Svenko’s walked through the door.
She had gone for a swim that morning in the condo pool, her first since surviving the shockingly cold waters of Disenchantment Bay. The associations of treading and stroking had not been pleasant, but she wouldn’t let the disaster ruin her appreciation for Ronald Reagan’s favorite sport.
Her first day back, she’d clicked onto the Deathknell website. Hailey Dusk was running the show now, pictured on the About page with a new look. The big, brown-blood–tinted hair was gone in favor of an unnaturally white, bald head and scalp tattoo depicting a crown of thorns. Melissa skimmed the newest content, nothing she hadn’t seen or wouldn’t see more of.
Barb Stamen’s death photo did exist. A series had been taken behind the utility room wall by a medical assistant following protocol for a death at sea. Melissa had seen them, pathetic and antiseptic in the white glare of a camera flash, but she did not see them on the freshest pages of Deathknell. Either the official photos had not leaked or Dusk had opted not to display them.
The drive to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport had been quiet that morning. Without saying so, Melissa realized she would miss seeing Dan in his navy-with-gold-piping Trans Oceanic suit.
Dan’s father had latched onto a ground-floor opportunity to develop a gated community on the outskirts of Boise. The previous developer had gone bust in the Meltdown, but Mr. Waldenburg had connections and capital. Insiders thought the Famous Potatoes State—distant as it was from the centers of Democrat power—would attract well-heeled émigrés from a world beset by rampant socialization.
Dan was going home, and though her boss didn’t know it yet, she was going with him.
Three or four times Dan had mentioned that there were a few investigative outfits doing business in Idaho’s state capital, and he did so again on the ride to the airport. Melissa listened, knowing the menu: workers’ comp fraud; the odd embezzlement; and a caseload of her former specialty, spousal irreconcilability and the concomitant custody issues. Dan also told her he was fine with her being a stay-at-home wife, and she guessed he wanted that, at least for now.
He had proposed in a Port Rachel fern bar, and they became engaged. For the first time in ages, Melissa felt part of a political party again. But her game of catch-up wasn’t over. Most of what she’d read about the Tea Party described it as being composed of reactionary, anachronistic, redneck corporate pawns surfacing in the ideological backwaters. Listening to Dan, that same Tea Party was a necessary and justified attempt to circumvent a Marxist transformation wrought by power-hungry collectivists and their willing accomplices in academia, Hollywood, and the mainstream media.
“Poker Face” had interrupted Melissa’s aloneness on the drive home from SeaTac. She’d turned it up. Lady Gaga’s foreboding opening synthesizer riff captured the moment perfectly and mesmerized anyone with ears to hear it.
A poker face is something any investigator needs as she negotiates the waters of misfortune and illegality. But Dan had brought her home to a place where expressive faces held all the currency, and long looks of trust and love carried the day. She had given her fiancé just such a look while dropping him off for his flight to Boise, and a passionate kiss
Her desk phone beeped: Ms. Claymore. “Mr. Scrimshaw would like to see you in his office,” Claymore chirped, stressing by her tone that it was nothing to worry about.
Melissa’s duties had been consequential in the fortnight since Charon had flown her out of Anchorage with her lower lip split open and the Svenko case solved. The last of the dry warmth that Washingtonians worship in late summer had worked its healing power and her lip
was now whole again.
Mr. Scrimshaw seemed coolly absent. What sat across from her under the Sinking of the Andrea Doria was like something behind the thick glass of an aquarium. Suddenly Melissa was beset by an odd wonderment: she wondered if Scrimshaw still worked for himself, was still the last word and guiding hand of Charon Investigations.
“Melissa, we’d like to send you back,” Scrimshaw said, his eyes focused on the part in her auburn hair.
Charon’s services had been retained by an entity he could not name. There was no murder to be solved, no humanity to be sifted through. They wanted her to enjoy herself on the mid-September Inside Passage cruise, the last of the season. To sit long hours reading on deck chairs, to spend money—earned by virtue of her new pay package—in the shops along the way. To enjoy gilt-edged evenings in the Polar Lights Room aboard Trans Oceanic’s recently promoted new flagship, the Global Reach.
There was economic tumult across the land, fortunes lost, retirements dashed. Families had been savaged, and more and more people were falling through the cracks. From a deep, repressed place she was not in touch with, Melissa had grieved for her country. A voice within that she did not recognize now affirmed that there was something to be done about what was happening, to keep it from ever happening again.
Independent investigative work was part of what could be done to save America. It was time to tell the Old Turtle that Idaho was where she was going to do it. A place she’d visited three times now with Dan and didn’t know if she liked yet. But she knew that she loved him. There they would wait out whatever was coming. Wait for a new leader, or movement, like the Tea Party, to rescue American and make things right again. *
On Haenke Island, where the days grew shorter and the nights much colder, the Northstar salvage operation was going round the clock. Soon the lost hours of daylight would make everything exponentially more difficult.
The former Trans Oceanic flagship was stripped to the last electronic motherboard, the last polyester curtain, the last swatch of insulation. Sev
eral of her signature fittings and unique design elements were reclaimed for maritime museums, and the whole onboard written history of her years in service was archived at corporate headquarters. The full inventory of the Edmondson Library was donated to a Yakutat fishing village that had lost three of its citizens the day of the calving on Disenchantment Bay. The ship’s undamaged ovens sold fast as pancakes to foreign interests. A mile’s worth of deck railing had been purchased by a Russian freight shipper. None of the windows were worth refitting to a new ship, but virtually all the lifeboats had ridden out the tsunami undamaged and were snapped up by a cruise line operating out of Rio de Janeiro.
Captain Squier’s command vessel was a metal husk under permanent twilight now, everything of value having been sold, everything not safely biodegradable having been removed and carted to landfills by tugboats pulling barges.
All that was left was to dislodge the hull from the sedimentary cove and tow the ship’s patched-up carapace out to where the salvage and demolition team had received permission from the Environmental Protection Agency to scuttle her.
Rich coral assemblages lived in the dark depths of the North Pacific, home to cold-water
species about which very little was known. Once holes were blown in her bottom, the Northstar would sink fast, and the environmentalists hoped that over time the ship most associated in the public mind with the Republican Party would become home to these primitive engineers of the oceans.
Unbeknownst to the salvagers, a private shipbuilder in Norfolk, Virginia, had begun construction of a sleek prototype, successor to the giant cruise ships that owned the market. Trans Oceanic had commissioned the build.
A cautious mentality had permeated the cruise line industry’s braintrust, with the smartest guys in the rooms counseling lines to downsize new fleet additions until the Great Recession had played out. While still qualifying as luxury liners, the new ships would be trimmed-down affairs, capable of higher speeds and improved maneuverability. They would find draft clearance in ports where the big ships couldn’t dock. Maximum occupancy aboard the new vessels would cap at one hundred passengers, and vacation cruises would cost substantially more than a berth on the Global Reach would.
The theory was that the future of seagoing recreation looked very much like the future of everything, and it prophesied the ascension to power of a globalist managerial elite that would rule independent of old ideas about American exceptionalism and the sovereignty of nations.
When completed in Norfolk, only the Imagine’s navy-blue-with-white-piping accents and scaled-down burgundy funnel would recall the glory days of the Trans Oceanic line, and an era that was ebbing into history.
THE END
Acknowledgments
Thanks go to Indigo Editing’s Ali McCart and Kristin Thiel for their able proofreading and line-editing assistance. Also, special thanks to Matt Margolis from Logotecture for formatting services and cover design.
About the Author
Mark Ellis is a journalist from Portland, Oregon, and has been a regular contributor at PJ Media since 2015. You can find his creative writing at Liberty Island Magazine.
You can follow Mark on Twitter at @Mr_MarkEllis