“We wouldn’t take up all your time,” she assured him. “We can do a matinee and then meet up for dinner. It’s been so long since we took a trip up to the city…”
“I gotta go, Mom. With all the flights, I’m beat.”
It was true. On some things, his mother didn’t argue. Jack said he loved her, which was also true, and ended the call.
As his town car reached Seward, Jack made one more Google search. Some of the articles he read on the flight referenced an official document released several years ago by the outgoing executive administration. Jack typed a few of the words he could remember and clicked on the first auto-fill option: National Near-Earth Objects Preparedness Strategy. The top link sent him to an unavailable webpage on the current whitehouse.gov site, one of several removed indefinitely.
Thank you for your interest in this subject, Jack read. Stay tuned as we continue to update whitehouse.gov. In sharp focus, contrasting with a blurry American flag in the background, were twin microphones atop a lectern with the presidential seal, as if any minute someone important would step up with something to say.
Jack’s driver parked at the Seward waterfront and unpacked his bags onto the concrete. Jack didn’t move when he came around and opened his passenger door. Never had he felt such hesitation before a long assignment. Not when his father needed heart surgery, not when an on-again-off-again girlfriend called him sobbing, not when an old sports injury acted up and left him limping in pain with heavy camera bags. Jack wasn’t one to believe in premonitions, and yet he had one even as all the people he encountered continued to function with an expectation of normalcy.
The driver ducked down, confused, but then saw Jack’s face.
“I could drive you back to Anchorage. I’m sure they’ll understand,” he added, nodding over his shoulder to the massive ship in port.
Jack quickly thanked the driver for his patience and shook his hand. He stepped into moist air that smelled of salty rot. The mist billowing down the snow-veined mountains surrounding Resurrection Bay was thick as smoke. Jack hoisted the weight of his bags onto both shoulders, ever mindful of his camera, and walked across the long and narrow dock with his head bowed.
He felt that all his assignments were of great significance, and documenting the last Arctic expedition by the US Coast Guard cutter Healy was no exception. There were only two guest slots available, and Jack had practically begged his editors to pull strings to secure one. They had all met at Washington, DC, headquarters back in June to discuss the magnitude of such a mission. It’s like you’re capturing the Yangtze River dolphin, one editor told Jack. Aboriginal Tasmanians. The Javan tiger. The Bo of the Great Andamanese peoples. Passenger pigeons whose flocks could blot out the sky…The editor winced and shook his head. All beautiful and extinct. All that’s left are fossils and pictures. Jack was assigned to capture the beauty of the Arctic with his camera before it was gone.
It wasn’t until he neared the water’s edge that Jack could see more than fifty large, feathered carcasses floating in the bay. He walked up to the edge of the dock, stood beside a piling wrapped with ropes thicker than a man’s wrist, and gaped at the dead dark birds of prey. A large young man walking several yards behind suddenly dumped his duffel bag and joined Jack to stare at the awful sight. He wore a navy brimmed cap and hooded sweatshirt with HEALY CREW in yellow block letters stretched across his wide shoulders.
“These are eagles,” the young man said, frowning in surprise. “It’s only been murres before.”
He scanned the water and pointed to the carcass of a penguin-like bird.
“There’s a murre. With the global weirding and all, things got out of whack and they starved. Thousands of ’em.”
Jack asked about the eagles, but the younger man shrugged and said he didn’t know.
“Maybe they saw the headlines about the comet,” Jack said, squinting up at the sky, now empty of eagles. “Or know something we don’t.”
“Aw, I heard that comet was a conspiracy. But enough of politics—I’m Ned Brandt.”
The beefy Coastie had the jaw, neck, and torso of a quarterback. His cheeks were flushed in the damp wind, and his face held an honest, open expression. He was handsome in a Chris Pratt kind of way. Ned was a Coast Guard lieutenant and helicopter pilot returning from mid-patrol break.
Jack gave his own name and a handshake.
“I’m one of the guests,” he explained.
“The poet?”
“No, I’m the other one. Photojournalist.”
“Yeah? Well, if you’re looking for aerial shots, I can take you out in the helicopter,” Ned offered. He suddenly smirked. “Unless that comet of yours leaves us SOLJWF.”
“What?”
“Shit outta luck and jolly well fucked,” Ned explained. “We’ve got lots of acronyms in the military.”
He jogged back to his duffel bag and lugged it over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. The two men continued on together to the end of the dock. Looming ahead was USCGC Healy, the country’s most technologically advanced polar icebreaker. The ship was longer than a football field and nine stories high, and for all the eye could see, there was another thirty feet of ship below the water. Despite this, Jack felt sure it would become claustrophobic on their late-summer deployment. Everything familiar became claustrophobic.
The two men approached Healy’s 420-foot hull, painted bright red for visibility on ice. Ned elbowed Jack in the ribs and nodded for him to follow as he cut ahead of the long, single-file line of civilian scientists waiting to check in with their luggage. A Coastie stood by the bottom of a steep gangway greeting the new arrivals. She gave a bright smile to Ned and checked Jack’s name off her passenger list. When she handed him a pager, Jack snorted a chuckle at the outdated equipment.
“Last time I saw one of these, it was hanging off the shorts of my freshman year pot dealer.”
The woman also handed Jack a welcome aboard packet and a new passenger card held together with a paper clip. The card listed his emergency life raft, pager number, and stateroom assignment. Jack was to share quarters with the other guest passenger, a poet and Nobel laureate in literature. A poet was an unusual pick for the expedition, as guest slots had previously gone to wildlife surveyors, filmmakers, photographers, and Indigenous community observers. Jack wondered if the selection committee was more sentimental in this final round and wanted the Arctic preserved inside the immortality of the written word.
Ned led the way as the two men lugged their bags up Healy’s metal gangway and into the red belly of the ship. Immediately on the right was a ladder well labeled MAIN DECK. Ned bounded up like a mountain goat, but Jack had to be cautious on the steep and shallow stairs while balancing the weight of his bags and camera. He turned down the passageway of 02 deck and found the door to his stateroom closed. Jack knocked and entered the dark, windowless room. After flipping on the lights, he jumped back, cursing. There was a small man sitting at a desk.
“Sorry,” Jack said quickly, “but you scared me.”
The other man stood, only as tall as Jack’s collarbone. Deep crescent lines arced from the inner corners of his black eyes down around gaunt eye sockets and into broad cheekbones. His hair—chopped bangs in the front and long and straight in the back—was still black and thick, though the skin of his face was weathered. Jack guessed the man was somewhere in his late forties to early fifties, but it was difficult to tell.