The hall is empty now. The crew went home hours ago, loud and new and pleased with themselves, and they had every right to be. Seven signatures. One company. A table that will wobble in my memory forever.
I stayed behind to clean up, because that is a thing captains do that nobody warns you about. The recruiting posters say adventure. Nobody’s poster says folding chairs.
So it’s me, one electric candle I’ve grown emotionally attached to against my better judgment, the last slice of cake, and the hawk.
The hawk is on the rafter. The hawk is staring at me.
I want to be clear about the quality of this stare. This is not an animal wondering about food. This is the stare of a creature that has watched me my whole life, knows every decision I have ever made, and has ranked them. I ate the cake under that stare. The cake, for the record, remains excellent, and remains logged as a company asset, and I will be reporting myself to the Quartermaster in the morning. The investigation should be short. I intend to cooperate fully.
But that’s not why I’m still up.
I’m still up because of the question. The one under everything. The one this whole company is built on top of, the way you’d build a hall on top of a cellar nobody’s opened.
Where did the sea go?
Not how. Not when. The stone tells you when, if you know how to read it, and the old ones argue about the how the way old ones argue about everything, at volume, over drinks, with charts nobody else can see. No. My question is where. An ocean is not a set of keys. You do not misplace one. Something that size does not slip out the back. It went somewhere, and in the grand tradition of this company doing things properly, I have opened an official inquiry.
Herewith, the log of theories examined this night:
Theory the first: the sea died. Rejected, and I’ll tell you why. Stand outside on any night in this country and feel what the air is doing to you. That wind is a tide. It rises, it runs, it turns. Dead things do not keep their tides. The Ghost Tide is not a memorial. It’s a pulse with no body around it, which is worse, and also, somehow, better.
Theory the second: the sea owed somebody money. More plausible than you’d like. Everything I have ever known to vanish overnight, quietly, without a note, taking everything it could carry, left for exactly this reason. I have known men like this. I may have BEEN men like this. The inquiry declines to elaborate. Status: open.
Theory the third: the sea got a better offer. Insulting. What offer? Where? Show me the coastline that outbid us. Status: rejected on grounds of pride.
Theory the fourth: the sea is hiding. From what, you’d ask, and there’s the itch in it. Because I have seen what the deep places of the world get quiet about, and I’ll say this much and no more: there are things even an ocean might not want to be found by. The hawk shifted its feet when I wrote that line. Make of that what you will. Status: open, and filed under “do not read after midnight.”
Theory the fifth: the sea left to come back. This is the one the old songs vote for. Tides go out. That’s half of what a tide IS. The going out is not the betrayal it feels like when you’re standing on the sand watching it happen. You just have to be very, very patient, and very, very stubborn, and it helps to have a crew, because the waiting is the hardest work this company will ever do and nobody should do it alone. Status: this is the one we fly the flag on.
I was there for the last storm. I’ll put that in the log, because it’s already in the songs and there’s no unsinging a song. The last storm anyone remembers rolling over the Long Gold, and I walked out of the far side of it with wet boots a thousand miles from any water, which is the kind of detail people want explained, and the explanation costs one drink, payable to whoever asks, answer not included in purchase.
But here’s what I never say out loud, so naturally I’m writing it in an official document where anyone can read it, because I’m told this is called “leadership”:
The storm didn’t feel like an ending. I’ve felt endings. Endings are quiet. That storm was loud the way a door is loud. And you don’t slam a door on a room you’re never coming back to. You slam it so they know you left.
The sea is out there somewhere, in whatever place seas go, being enormous and unreasonable and owed several apologies, and one day the Ghost Tide is going to rise out of the west with weight behind it, real weight, salt weight, and every marooned soul on the Long Gold is going to stand up at the same time without knowing why.
And when that happens, this company will be on the shore in its colors with its steel clean, and the sea is going to look at us, all of us, every stubborn signed-up one of us, and it is going to have to explain itself.
I look forward to that conversation. I’ve been rehearsing my part for years. It’s one sentence long and I’m not writing it in the log.
The candle’s dying, or whatever electric candles do. Retiring. The cake is avenged, by which I mean eaten. The wind is running its old course around the hall like it’s checking the moorings on a ship that isn’t there anymore.
Seven names on the Articles. One captain who doesn’t know where the ocean went.
That’s not a weakness in the founding. That IS the founding. Every company worth sailing with is just people agreeing to not know something together.
The sea left. We didn’t.
Logged alone, past the sensible hours, first year of the Company. The hawk watched me write every word of this, and when I read the fourth theory aloud, it looked at the door. I checked the lock. Captain’s privilege. The hawk declined to comment.