Ethan Rutherford - The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories

From the street, Charles will see his wife has come home. He’ll see she’s turned off most of the lights—the outside lights, the bedroom lights, the lights in the living room—but the kitchen lights are still on, and through that particular window, he can see her, leaning against the refrigerator, standing still like she’s studying something on the refrigerator, unaware of everything else, standing posed, as if framed in a painting. She could be anyone’s wife. He wishes she were anyone, at this point, but his wife. He’ll reach down for some snow, pack a snowball, and underhand it at the window. She’ll startle, and glance at the direction of the sound. She’ll turn her body toward the window, and roll her shoulders forward, unsure of herself, and he’ll know then that he loves her, but he can’t help, or stop, himself. He’s pulled his hood low over his face. He doesn’t want to be recognized, even if, and this he doubts, she can see beyond her own reflection in the glass. He’ll pick up a stick, chuck it onto the roof so it pinball-clatters between the gables, and be pleased with the sound. She won’t take her eyes off the window. He’ll reach down again, and pack another snowball; this one he’ll toss overhand, aimed right for the center of the painting. He hasn’t thrown like this since high school. He hasn’t moved like this since before he knew Claire. He hadn’t ever in his life been hit in the face, and this snowball is aimed directly at her face. It is flying perfectly. And directly before impact, the instant before the snowball flattens and Velcro-sticks to the window with its hollow thwack, the lights, in the kitchen, go dark.

december 10

This evening near the end of our shift the sun cracked like a brilliant orange yolk over the horizon. Bushard was standing next to me at the rail, and I told him it reminded me of the radiant and cold northern sunsets of my youth. He conceded that it would be possible to see it as beautiful, if only he could forget that beyond the twilit sand we could see was an operatic expanse of more sand. If he could erase this particular moment in history, have chosen another industry, and could, in fact, be someone other than himself, he said, then yes: beautiful. I told him that was the uplift I’d been looking for. He shrugged and replied it wasn’t his job to cheer me up.

Tuva, my sister, you know me! I am long gone; your anger is justified. I left you when I could have stayed, when you needed me most, and my guilt has tugged at me like a living thing as we’ve crossed these dunes, looking for the bounty we have slowly come to realize may no longer be here. My messages to you go unanswered, but still I write, as if to underscore my own solitude and give shape to this expedition. These notes are addressed privately to you as well as myself; I feel compelled to put everything down. Will you read them? Years from now, will any of this make sense? At the very least I hope to find a friend in this log; and if not you, then perhaps someone else will consider these jottings of note. Perhaps I will even find fame in an obscure journal of history. I’m dating these entries; there’s no reason for everything to come to nothing. The light has gone, the room is asleep. Let’s begin.

My name is Lewis Dagnew, low crewman and spotter aboard the shipper-tank Halcyon, a tight-sleeper in an iron fo’c’sle, and one of thirty men to cast our lots and try our luck amidst the rolling dunes and oppressive heat found in the territory known as the Desert Gulf of Mexico. We left terra firma—packed dirt—over a year ago, and came to pin our fortune on the sliding sands; a fevered prospect, thus far an elusive hope. In the Halcyon ’s case, fortune means a full hold; and we are here, a million miles from home, surrounded by a basin of sand four thousand miles wide, for one reason only: to spot, lance, and render dirwhal, that sand-diving beast, that dirt-drinking mass, that oil-saturated slowpoke who gave rise to an industry that not too long ago supported the energy needs of the entire southern biosphere.

According to a normal timetable for an expedition like ours, we should’ve been off the sand months ago. Instead, we’ve pushed farther and farther out, treading concentric and ever-widening circles that place us well outside of the historically teeming hunting grounds. The heat during the day is constant and unyielding, the temperature yet to dip below 113 degrees, and our daily sweep has come to feel like a slow grinding scuttle across the floor of an arid oven. We’ve been issued sun-suits for the UV, but they do little to mitigate the heat. At the end of our deck shifts we go below, peel the heavy suits from our skin, and make jokes about being basted in our own juice.

We are, it seems, alone on the sand. In the galley there’s a poster that explains how the pay structure works. It’s titled: Envision Success. But there have been no true dirwhal sightings, no trumpet’s call. Instead we compare heat-induced hallucinations of dirwhals breaching just off the bow and slipping back into the sand, never to be seen again.

In the early months, we glimpsed other shipper-tanks cresting over the far dunes, but at that distance it was unclear if they were friendly vessels or not. We steered clear, and they disappeared like memories. Tuva: I would say that this state of isolation and disappointment dovetails with my general constitution and the luck I’ve had so far in life. But I am resolved to think of this voyage as more than a series of setbacks, even as the majority of the crew has begun to fret about the apparent barrenness of our surroundings. I am not here to sound the depths of my self-pity; I am here to push past the vagueness of my limited accomplishments. This morning, Renaldo caught me holding this journal and suggested I bind the pages and title it the Denouement . But why not assume that tomorrow will bring us what we’re looking for? Tonight I said as much to Bushard before lights-out.

“A dream is a wish your heart makes,” he said, then turned his back to me and pulled his pillow over his head.

december 18

The Halcyon is a G Model 7 Kermode shipper-tank—one of the last in a series to roll out of Detroit before the invasion shut those factories down during my father’s generation—equipped with modified sand-treads and a flat metal deck. We are a slow-moving factory, an ungainly vessel that serves both as a hunting ship and a one-stop bio-processing plant. Our bow curves like a shovel, and is weighted for equal distribution at the contact points with the porous sand that surrounds us. The bridge rises abruptly, perpendicular, straight up, and is well windowed to aid with spotting. Stem to stern measures 180 feet, the length of three full-grown dirwhals laid head to tail. Middeck there’s a portable tryworks—three huge iron cauldrons perched atop industry-grade burners—where all our rending will theoretically occur. The cutting instruments—bizarrely curved, long-handled pole-knives so sharp you can’t help but imagine slipping them through flesh—are lashed under the portholes for easy access.

From a distance, the overall impression the ship gives on the sand is that of a single and colossal iron shoe. Our hold, now empty, is a cavernous double-deck capable of storing the rendered bio-matter of anywhere between four to six hundred mature dirwhals. At four RPMs, the engine roar of the Halcyon is deafening; at six it’s like confusion opening in your skull. Below deck it’s a Minotaur maze of close corridors and low ceilings, poorly lit passageways that dead-end for no discernible reason. The buggy-steerers, mates, and coopers: they’ve each got their bunks aft, walls decorated with posters and postcards. Our Captain Tonker’s got his king’s quarters. The rest of us sleep in the bow near the engine, where there is little relief from the motorized churn of our generators.