The Meridian

I am writing this in a cabin forty miles from the nearest town, with the Pacific pushing at the cliff below my window, and I am still not certain anyone will believe a word of it. The people who ought to believe it do not want to, and the people who might have believed it are mostly dead. That is the first thing you need to know about what happened on Palisade Island: the truth was never in short supply there. It was witnesses who were scarce.

My name is Owen Marsh. I am a marine ecologist, or I was until I stopped being able to stand the company of my own species. For eleven years I studied kelp forests up and down the California coast, diving the cold green corridors between the Channel Islands, counting urchins, logging the slow dying of the big beds. I knew the water the way other men know a street. What I did not know was how fast a life can come apart, and how little say you get in the timing.

The trouble started with a borrowed sailboat and a storm that was not supposed to turn. In March of last year I had a grant to survey a dead urchin barrens off San Nicolas, and a colleague named Lena Okafor lent me her thirty-foot cutter, the Pintail, on the condition that I bring it back without a scratch. I brought it back without a hull. The wind came up at dusk, out of nowhere, the way it does in that stretch of water, and by midnight the sea was standing up in black walls and the Pintail was taking water faster than the pump could clear it. I got the life raft off the foredeck, which I still count as a piece of luck, and I spent the next nine hours in it, wet to the bone, watching the cutter's mast light blink and go under.

Dawn found me alone in a gray calm, with nothing on the horizon but a smear of fog and a line of pelicans going somewhere with more sense than I had. I had water for a day, no food, and a story to tell that I did not want to be my last one. I was two days into that raft, with my lips cracked and my mind starting to make offers it had no business making, when a vessel found me.

She came up out of the fog bow-first, low and white, with a stubby mast and a deckhouse that looked like it had been bolted on by someone in a hurry. Her name was painted in faded letters at the stern. The Meridian. She was not a fishing boat and not a yacht; she was the kind of workboat that does not advertise what it carries. I waved my shirt until my arm ached, and she altered course, and a man on the deckhouse roof aimed a pair of binoculars at me for a long minute before he went inside.

The man who finally hauled me over the rail was not the man with the binoculars. He was younger, mid-thirties, with a sunburned face and the soft, careful hands of someone who handles animals for a living. He gave me a blanket before he gave me a name. His name was Dean Corbett, and he asked me two questions: was I injured, and had I seen what was in the forward hold.

The forward hold was the first thing that should have told me to be careful. It was padlocked from the outside, and when the deck heaved, something inside it heaved back. I heard a sound I have heard a thousand times in labs and aquariums, the low, patient complaint of a large animal in a small space. I did not think much of it. A workboat with a padlocked hold carrying an animal is not a crime; it is a Tuesday.

What I did think about was the captain. He came up from below an hour later, a thick-necked man in his sixties with a beard that had food in it, and he looked at me the way you look at a stain on a good jacket. Captain Rhodes, Corbett called him, and Rhodes said he was not in the business of picking up strays. He said it twice, and the second time he said it to the sky, as if the sky had a vote. Corbett talked him around with the ease of a man who has done it before, and they put me in a bunk in the deckhouse with a bowl of stew that tasted of everything the galley had ever cooked in it.

Three things happened that night. The wind came back and the Meridian rode it like a grudging horse, rolling enough to keep me awake. The animal in the hold quieted, then screamed once, a sound with a shape to it that I did not want to examine. And Corbett came down the companionway at two in the morning, sat on the edge of my bunk, and told me we were not going to San Pedro after all.

"We're putting in at Palisade Island," he said. "A private island. Company property. The Warden will want to meet you before we decide what to do with you."

"Who's the Warden?"

Corbett looked at the deck between his boots for a while. "Dr. Roland Voss," he said. "He runs the Station. He's a good man, most of the time."

I should have asked what the rest of the time looked like. Instead I asked where Palisade Island was, and Corbett said it did not have a dot on most charts, and I was too tired to wonder why a company island would not want one. I slept, and I dreamed of the thing in the hold, and when I woke the water had turned a color I had never seen outside a lab bottle, and the island was up ahead, low and brown and shaped like a sleeping animal.