He looked at me for a long time, then broke his gaze and faced the water. “You know, I once saw a burning oil slick sucked up by the eye of a cyclone while at sea. It pulled fire up into a blazing column that moved over the water like God’s fiery finger, tracing a new fault line. A fault line that, if it had crossed our path, my passengers and I would have all died. How could a man-made border mean anything once you’ve seen something like that?”
I wished for other boats like the Royal Crest to leave every port in Europe. I wanted my father, Uncle Martin, Ludo and his family, Hilda, Mrs. Von Schuler, Mevi and Janna, Herbert Yarborough, the armed friar, the old couple who took my toes, and all the starving, scared, and wounded to be saved before the military tide that had swept into Germany could be pushed back, kicked under, by some giant revolt.
“What would you do if you had the opportunity to save somebody?” the captain asked me.
I cupped my hands around my face to shield him from seeing the gloss of my eyes. I had been relying on my calculations and rough instinct for so long, I had trained my mind to oscillate away from the deep, feeling part of me. The place where I held the knowledge that I hadn’t been able to save anyone. But this man must have sensed my distress, my guilt, and I was fearful that if my thoughts were exposed, the whole continent of the past would heave up and crash over me, swallowing me in an unforgiving and savage swoop. In the silence he asked, “Are your parents gone?”
“Yes.” I began crying into my hands.
“Siblings?”
“Yes.”
“Your uncle?”
“I’m not sure.”
“That doesn’t surprise me. He was always a cunning one.” The captain’s eyes were on me again in the darkened wheelhouse.
“What?”
“Your uncle. Really tall. Tattoos. Whistles through that funny gap in his teeth when he talks too fast.”
I stood up so fast I felt a cool push of air against my wet face. “You know him?”
His smile was detached, and his probing eyes contained many strands of consideration. Of me, of what he should say. Of the way this night might unfold. “Not as Martin, but I know him.”
“I don’t understand. Are you one of the men I was asking for?”
The captain nodded. He looked out the windows and scanned the water then turned back to me.
“Are you Courtier or Méndez?”
He nodded again.
“Which one?” I asked.
He arched his eyebrows and gave me a subtle grin.
“Both?”
He nodded again.
“And Valspar and McCollum?”
He nodded again.
I had a hard time comprehending what I was hearing. “Why are you telling me this?”
“That’s a good question.” He started to say something but began a fit of deep, stomach-folding coughing into the crook of his arm. I waited until he finished.
“Peter heard me asking for you in the port?”
He nodded.
“That’s why he sent me to you. To see who I was?”
“You got it,” he said. “You know, it’s been my experience that it’s the incidents we can’t control that make us who we are.” We sat without speaking for what felt like a long time as the bow cut through the rolling swells. I pictured a tower of fire swirling over the water, and knew political boundaries meant nothing when weighed against a single human heart. I did not know the captain’s motivations, nor he mine, but that night I understood I had crewed up with a shadow ship.
After that, I walked the decks with Captain Fernandes on his night rounds. He scanned the holds, laden with ripening fruit, sprouting potatoes, and burlap sacks of grain giving off the concentrated odors of earth. There were heaps of dried fish; pallets of concrete and rebar; reams of paper, barrels of liquor, molasses, and tar; and all manner of assembled products from years of crossing and recrossing the equator, stretching from pole to pole. And hidden in the holds were people who were forging ahead to a fresh start.
On one of the night rounds, we went to the engine room and watched the blurred-out wheels of the twin diesels and the steady force of the plunging pistons, and I let the hum of orbiting machine parts and electric light seep into me. Standing there with the engine songs and the scent of spent oil and bilge water was sort of like receiving Holy Communion for me. In the holds beneath the waterline, looking over the machinery that pushed steel bones of the ship through wave after wave, I felt at peace being on the ocean, and with the idea of being a stranger to no port but always moving on. As if noticing my interest, the captain had me follow him around his vessel, as if showing me what his life was really like, why and how he did what he did.
“If our schedule holds, we’ll dock in Halifax to refuel. Half the passengers will be dropped off there and will make their way to communities in Maritime Canada that have paid for their transport. The rest will be delivered to Boston and New York, where I’ve arranged paperwork for them.
“We’ll then return to Halifax before heading back to England. If you want, I’ll pay you for the next trip if you want to stay on. I can show you how to do this. There aren’t many who do this work and it’s good work. Your uncle was good at this. He probably thought the same of you when he gave you that list of names.”
“What if you get caught?”
“All boats fall on a bitter tide.”
“You might be killed.”
“Nothing’s for certain.” He hacked up something wet from deep in his lungs.
“Not if you do this kind of work.”
“Some foolhardy things are well worth doing.” The dim light reflected off his bald patch. The captain told me to think about it, and when I did, I felt as solitary as I had in the darkest moments in the cave. I thought of the thousands of people who could trace the ocean’s waves back to their homeland, to a life now lost. It was horribly selfish to have been concerned only with saving myself when there were all these others who needed saving as well.
I imagined what my life could now be. I imagined Québec, Ottawa, or somewhere in the States, or South America. Somewhere on land. But the land was full of lank flags, and the earthly history of boundaries claimed and fought over and reclaimed. At sea, the flags were taut and snapped violently in the wind, as if alive, and the waves kept creating and erasing the shape of the world. Powerful yet tranquil, the roll of the sea was significant to me in ways my heart could only murmur, and could not be put in words. For me, the choice felt natural. The ship offered life at the edge, beyond the borderlands, beyond common language, beyond the past and all it carried on its shoulders. The sea offered constant motion, a running toward the future, unburdened from the past. Yes, I knew the sea was for me.