Aboard the ship, the first thing I noticed was the smell. Metal, grease, industrial solvents, fuel, rubber, exhaust—it smelled like my dad’s coveralls when he unpacked his duffel bag from a hitch on the rig. It smelled, to me, exactly like loneliness and loss, and the perplexing sense that something happened to my dad each time he left, like there was a little less of him each time he came back. I knew that where the Stennis was headed was not an actual combat zone, but still I worried about where it would take Ross, or if he was the kind of guy who could lose himself in a place like this. We threaded our way belowdecks through an impossible number of identical hallways, up and down ladders, and past areas cordoned off for painting or repair, stepping up over the curved lip of the hatch each time we came to a doorway and angling our shoulders sideways each time we passed someone headed the opposite direction. Clatters and bangs echoed in between a variety of announcements from speakers mounted overhead.
Finally, Ross found his stateroom and ushered me in. “Stateroom” made it sound grand, but what we stood in looked a lot like an industrial janitor’s closet. I knew I should have been grateful for the luxury of it compared to the vast room we’d seen full of human filing cabinets where enlisted sailors slept in bunks stacked four high. But I struggled to hide my horror when Ross flapped his arms and said triumphantly, “Look, I can stretch my arms all the way out!” We climbed up together into his bunk, which he’d outfitted with a foam-core mattress that he’d trimmed down from twin-sized so that it would fit. It was impossible to sit up without hitting my head on a network of interlaced white pipes. A narrow metal shelf with a fluorescent reading light stuck out from the wall next to the bed. I could see how it would afford just enough room for a few books and pictures. Ross turned on his side and wedged an arm in behind my head and started talking about plans he’d made for a full-length blackout curtain around the bunk’s edge so his roommates could come and go, or play video games, without waking him. I stared at the shelf inches from my nose, remembering all the pictures and letters I’d sent my dad over the years in the hopes that he’d stick them up with a magnet somewhere and remember me. Suddenly I felt claustrophobic, practically clawing my way out over his reclined body.
“I need some air.”
Up on the flight deck, Ross took me to see the catapult at the front of the boat that would launch him out over the waves. All I could see was a recessed track, kind of like the cable car tracks on the streets in San Francisco.
“This thing is loud. I could hear it all night long from my bunk, just a huge-ass piston slamming forward and then being reeled back in.”
Then we went to see the arresting wires, all four laid out across the deck and covered in black grease.
“Remind me, which wire is the one you want to catch?”
“The three wire.”
I knelt by the three wire, unabashedly reverent, and touched it lightly, asking it in my head to catch him and hold him, trying to infuse it with magnetism and a light he could see in the dark. I looked to the back of the boat, trying to picture the tiny landing lights of a plane a mile off in pitch blackness, and I told this wire to send out its message to the hook searching for it out over the waves. Call him to you, hold him here.
Ross led me around the rest of the boat—the wardroom dining areas, the “gerbil gyms,” the ready room, where I checked out his little mail cubby and the bay of computers where he would be checking his e-mail, since there wasn’t Internet access in the staterooms. He was at ease, full of facts like a museum docent and obviously excited in a way that felt alienating to me. He was looking forward to blending into this world, and all I wanted was to escape it.
—
Stella’s three-year-old daughter used to hide when she saw an aircraft carrier on TV. She thought that it was alive and feeding off the people inside it, and that it ate her dad for months at a time. The weekend we all toured the boat, she seemed to have forgotten this impression and detailed to me her plans to become a helicopter pilot when she was six, and then to take up jets so she could make big noises and land on boats.
Over the course of the weekend, every time we drove over the bridge from San Diego to Coronado Island, she strained in her car seat to ask which boat was her dad’s, and every time I pointed to the giant gray mass out in the bottle green water. She seemed reassured by its size and told me nothing in the world could break it, not even monsters. I wished my impressions were as clear and comforting, and I continued to wish that when we came back home and I watched Ross start to pack.
PART II
CHAPTER 9