Ethan Rutherford - The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories

Two days ago, someone taped up one of the Firstie leaflets on the back wall of the toilet-stall. It’s titled: “It’s Not Too Late to Take Responsibility for What You Are Doing.” It encourages us to return home and join their cause as spokespeople. There’s a contest going to see who can scrawl the most realistic-looking dick on it using only the letters provided.

“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.