Chapter 3
Nerissa
We hated each other for approximately six hours.
I want to be precise about that, because Junho tells it as days and Junho is a liar with a good memory, which is the worst combination available.
Hour one: he walked the Halcyon bow to stern without saying anything.
Not touching. Just looking. He put his hand flat on the compressor housing for a second like he was taking its temperature, and then he looked at the air rack, and then he looked at the tenders' harness hanging on its peg, and then he looked at the harness for a beat too long and moved on.
"You can say it," I said.
"Say what."
"Whatever the face is doing."
"Face isn't doing anything."
"The face is doing a paragraph."
He crouched by the rack. "Your yoke o-rings are original."
"They're fine."
"They're 2011."
"They're fine, they're seated, I check them — "
"I'm not arguing." He stood up. "I'm going to change them."
"You've been on this boat eleven minutes."
"Twelve."
Hour two: he found the patch on the number two hose.
Hour three: he found the second patch on the number two hose, which, in my defense, was a very good patch.
"Who did this," he said.
"Me."
"With what."
"With a repair kit and a functioning brain."
"It's a bicycle kit."
"It's a rubber kit."
"Nerissa." He held the hose up. He had to hold it up quite high, because of the general situation with his arms. "This is a bicycle patch on a breathing hose."
"It's held for four months."
"That's not a defense. That's a description of luck."
"Okay, well, some of us don't have a desert full of money behind us — "
"That's not what this is."
"— some of us are running an operation on actual margins, and if you'd like to critique the margins, the ledger's below, it's the one that makes people cry."
He looked at me for a second.
Then he went below and got the ledger.
Hour three and a half: Junho, delightedly, from the dock, to nobody: "He found the second patch."
"JUNHO."
"I'm narrating! You narrate!"
"I narrate usefully."
"Debatable," said Pop.
"Nobody asked the bucket."
Hour four was him reading my ledger at the galley table, which I had not expected and did not enjoy.
He read it the way he'd looked at the boat. No comment. Page by page, one finger going down a column, for thirty-five minutes, while I stood in the companionway pretending to look for something in a locker I had already looked in twice.
"You want a coffee," I said.
"No."
"Because it's fine if you want to say something."
"I'm reading."
"You've been reading for a very long time and I want to be clear that this is my father's handwriting for the first eleven pages, so whatever you're building up to — "
"Nerissa."
"What."
"You've spent four hundred and ten dollars a month for two years," he said, "on a slip you don't use, at a marina in Marathon."
I stopped.
"That's — " I came down the steps. "That's the Rosalind's slip."
"The Rosalind's here. She's tied up thirty feet from where I'm sitting."
"She's — " I looked at the page. "She's been here since March."
"March of when?"
I did the arithmetic and it came out very badly.
"Oh my God," I said.
"Yeah."
"I've been paying for an empty slip in Marathon for seventeen months."
"Nine thousand eight hundred and forty dollars," Torren said, and turned the page.
I sat down on the step.
"Don't say anything," I said.
"Wasn't going to."
"You are saying something. Your entire body is a sentence."
"I'm reading a ledger."
"You're reading it at me."
Hour five was him coming up on deck and saying, "Your fuel's thirty percent over what it should be for the hours you're logging."
"I know."
"So it's the injectors."
"Thank you," said Junho, from nowhere. "Thank you. Ris. Thank you."
"Nobody asked you, Junho, go be in love with a marine biologist."
"She's not a marine — "
"I know she's not a marine biologist, that's my entire point, that's been my point since June."
Hour six is where it fell apart.
Because at hour six I said something about landlocked bikers playing sailor, which I'd been saving, and it was good, it was genuinely a good line, and he didn't say anything back at all.
He just went and sat on the fish box and looked out at the channel with his forearms on his knees and let me have it.
And there is nothing worse in this world than winning against somebody who isn't playing.
Then the sun went down and the main air line let go.
We were tied up. It wasn't dangerous. It was just catastrophic in the specific way that only happens at seven p.m. on a Thursday when every marine supply between here and Marathon is closed until Monday and you have a tide window Saturday you cannot move.
The line parted at the swage. Frayed jacket, kinked, tired, thirty feet of it garbage.
I stood there and looked at it under the deck light and did the math, and the math said: no dive Saturday, no dive Saturday means no second transect before the hearing, and no second transect means Meridian Deep's affidavit is the only survey narrative in front of a judge.
"Okay," I said. "Okay. Okay."
"You're saying okay a lot," Junho said.
"I'm aware of what I'm saying."
Torren came up the dock with a coffee in each hand.
He put one down on the rail next to me. He looked at the hose. He looked at it for about four seconds.
Then he set his own coffee down, went into my locker without asking, came out with the spool of spare line, the swage kit, a knife, and my headlamp — which he had apparently clocked the location of at some point in the last six hours without ever opening that locker — and he knelt down on the deck.
"Hold the light," he said.
"I can splice."
"I know."
"I've spliced that line four times."
"I know." He didn't look up. "Hold the light."
I held the light.
Here's what I know about hands. I grew up on a dock. I have watched men's hands my whole life, and you can tell everything about a person in about forty seconds of watching them work rope.
He worked in the dark, on a rocking deck, with a headlamp beam I was deliberately keeping slightly wrong to be annoying, and he did not look at his hands once.
Not once. He looked at the line — where it was going, three moves ahead — and his hands went where they went underneath like they were a separate agency reporting in.
Three minutes and forty seconds.
Cleaner than mine. Cleaner than my father's.
He tested it, coiled the tail, hung it on the peg, and stood up.
"Try it in the morning," he said. "If it holds pressure you're diving Saturday."
And then he picked his coffee back up and drank some of it, and I had to go sit down on the fish box for reasons which I described at the time, out loud, to nobody, as entirely unrelated.
Friday I took the boat out to sit on the site.
Not to dive. To sit on it, because possession is nine tenths of every law ever written by people with boats, and because Meridian Deep had a hundred-and-forty-foot DP vessel called the Argos Reach that had been doing slow arrogant laps out there since Wednesday.
We anchored two miles inside the box and let them look at us.
Junho and Pop took the skiff in at four to get the o-rings from a guy in Marathon who owed Pop something from 1998.
Which left the boat.
Which left me and Torren and about a hundred and ten square feet of wheelhouse, and a radio pulling in a Havana station that played, no exaggeration, the same brass-heavy song approximately every eleven minutes.
Before they went, we all stood at the rail and looked at the Argos Reach for a while, the way you look at weather.
"She's beautiful," Junho said, mournfully.
"She's a hundred and forty feet of somebody else's money."
"She's got a moon pool, Ris."
"I don't want to hear the words moon pool on this vessel again."
"She's got dynamic positioning. She doesn't even anchor. She just — decides where she is."
"That's not a personality trait, Junho, that's four thrusters."
"I want four thrusters."
"I want injectors," I said. "Get in the skiff."
Torren, at the rail, said nothing for a while. Then: "They're not surveying."
"What?"
"Three days. Same box, same speed, same heading, back and forth." He didn't take his eyes off her. "That's not a search pattern. That's a man mowing a lawn so the neighbors see him mowing a lawn."
"They're establishing presence."
"They're establishing a photograph," he said. "For a judge."
And that was the first moment I thought: oh, this one's not just muscle.
"That's the fourth time," he said, later.
"Fifth."
"Fourth."
"You missed one, you were in the head."
"You counted while I was in the head?"
"I count constantly. It's a condition." I had the chart out on the console, weighting the corners with whatever was nearest, which that day was a wrench, a lime, and a pack of playing cards.
"Okay. Come here. I want to show you the field before you go down on it, because if you go down on it blind you'll waste twenty minutes just — "
"Nerissa."
"— orienting, and twenty minutes at ninety on air is real money, so — "
"Nerissa."
"What."
"You've said 'okay, come here' three times and I've been standing next to you the whole time."
I looked up.
He was, in fact, standing next to me. Very much next to me. The wheelhouse of the Halcyon is not a room, it's a suggestion of a room, and he took up an amount of it that should have been discussed in advance.
"Right," I said. "Well. Consistency's a virtue."
He looked down at the chart.
He smelled like salt and coffee and the two-stroke oil off the skiff, which is not a fragrance anyone is going to bottle, and which I have subsequently thought about more than I'd like to admit in a document.
"There," he said, and put one finger on the northwest corner.
"That's my hole."
"That's your hole. Where the cable shorted."
"Yeah."
"So that's the part they don't have either."
I stopped.
I had been so busy being furious about what they'd stolen that I had never once gotten around to being interested in what they hadn't.
"Oh," I said.
"Yeah."
"Oh, that's — " I put both hands flat on the chart. "That's fifty meters of debris field that exists in no document on earth."
"Uh huh."