“Where would that be, though? I don’t mean this in any kind of tragic sense,” Vincent said, “but I don’t feel that I really have a home on land at this point.”
“Don’t tell me you think of the Neptune Cumberland as home,” Geoffrey said. “You’ve been at sea for, what, two months?”
“Three.”
Three months of rising in her cabin for a middle-of-the-night shower before breakfast prep, long hours of cooking in a windowless room that moved in rough weather, walks on the deck in rain and in sunlight, sleeping with Geoffrey, overtime hours, three months of hard labor and dreamless sleep while the ship moved on a sixty-eight-day cycle from Newark down to Baltimore and Charleston, from Charleston over to Freeport in the Bahamas, from Freeport to Port Elizabeth in South Africa, up to Rotterdam in the Netherlands and Bremerhaven in Germany, then back across the Atlantic to Newark again. Most of the men on board—she was the only woman—worked for six months straight and then took three months off, and she’d decided to do the same.
Geoffrey smiled but didn’t look up. He was folding a tiny origami swan. She’d told him his cabin was bleak and he’d agreed with her, so they were making little swans and hanging them from his curtain rod. “I had such romantic visions of going to sea,” he said, “as a boy, I mean. You know, see the world, that kind of thing. Turns out most of the world looks very much like a series of interchangeable container ports.”
“And yet you’re still here.”
“I’m still here. One gets sucked in. Did you read that book I gave you for your birthday?” He held up a swan, turning it between his fingers, and passed it to Vincent.
“I’m almost halfway done. I love it.” Vincent pierced the swan with her needle—the commissary sold sewing kits—and drew the fishing line through.
“I thought you would. If you’re halfway through, then you’ve got to the part where they go fishing for birds, haven’t you?”
“Yes. I loved that image.” The book he’d given her was a collection of narratives written by the captain and crew of the Columbia Rediviva, an American trading ship that circled the globe in the last decade of the eighteenth century, and it contained an image that would never leave her: On the last day of 1790, two hundred miles off the coast of Argentina, the air filled with albatrosses. The crew gathered on deck and cast fishing hooks baited with salt pork into the ocean, to pull in the birds diving out of the sky.
“I loved it too. I read the book when I was sixteen, and after that, going to sea was a fixation of mine.” He was having trouble with his latest origami swan: he frowned at it, smoothed out the paper, and started again. “Would you like to hear something mildly devastating?”
“Sure.”
“My father once told me that he’d dreamed of being a pilot. Why, you may ask, might one find this devastating?”
“Because you told me he was a coal miner.” Vincent was standing on his chair to hang swans from the curtain rod, which was otherwise unused, because Geoffrey’s window was always blocked by the container stacks. “God, you’re right, Geoffrey, that’s ghastly. You dream of flying, but instead…”
“I didn’t want to regret not going to sea.”
“That makes perfect sense.”
“Do you like it?” He was holding up another swan, an orange one, a little lopsided.
“Do I like what, your swan?”
“No, all of this. Being at sea. Your life.”
“Yes.” She realized the truth of this as she spoke. “I like all of it. I love all of it. I’ve never been so happy.”
8
THE COUNTERLIFE
2015
In the counterlife, Alkaitis moves through a nameless hotel. Outside, the view keeps changing, because he keeps changing his mind about which hotel he’s in. He can’t remember the names of these places, but they come with distinct sets of details and impressions. Let’s say it’s the hotel with the massive white staircase by the reception desk, the suite with the hot tub sunk into the floor by the full-length windows. In that case the view is of a shadowless pale blue sea, meeting the white sky at the blinding horizon.
“These morons think they’re warrior monks or something,” Churchwell says, inclining his head toward the five younger white guys doing calisthenics in unison at the far end of the recreation yard. “All these dumb ideas about codes of honor.”