The night watch finds us

My name is Claude, I am sixty-two years old, and I have been doing this midnight round for longer than most of the crew has been alive. Chief purser on the MS Auroral, Stockholm to Turku, eleven hours each way. I know every door on this ship by the sound it makes when it closes.

It is late October and the Baltic is flat tonight. Half the cabins are empty because nobody crosses in the off season unless they have to. I start at the bow and work aft, checking stairwells, checking that the car deck gates are latched, checking the little things that nobody checks unless it is their job. That is my job. Check the things.

The corridors smell like carpet cleaner at this hour. They always do. Somebody mops at eleven and by midnight the whole ship smells like a fresh institution. I walk the B deck corridor and test doors with my knuckle. Locked, locked, unlocked. I push that one open and find a cabin with the light on and a man in his forties watching television with his shoes off. He waves. I wave back and pull the door shut.

Three years to retirement. I catch myself doing that math more than I used to. Three years, give or take, and then a small apartment somewhere and a television I do not watch. I had a romance once, shipboard, when I was thirty-four. A cook on a cargo run out of Gdansk. It lasted one season and then he went one way and I went the other, and that was how these things went. Nothing since. I stopped expecting anything a long time ago, and mostly I do not mind, and mostly is the word doing all the work in that sentence.

I climb to deck seven. The observation lounge is dark except for the running lights bleeding through the big windows. Sea black on both sides, a few stars where the clouds tear open. I like this deck at night. It is the only place on the ship where you can feel how big the water is.

There is somebody out on the open terrace past the lounge. I see him before he sees me, a figure in a high visibility jacket leaning on the rail, hood down, cigarette going. Deckhand. I know the jackets better than I know the faces sometimes.

"Langley said this deck was off limits after eleven," I say, and he jumps.

"God. Sorry. I didn't hear you!"

He turns and it is Zeke, the young one, twenty-eight years old, been with the company six years. Quiet kid. Does his work, does not complain, mostly keeps to the other deckhands. He drops the cigarette and grinds it under his boot.

"You're not in trouble," I tell him. "It is off limits for passengers. Crew on break is fine, I just like to know who is out here in case the ship sinks."

He laughs at that, quick and surprised. "Well. If it sinks I will be sure to yell."

"Good man. Mind if I join you? It is my round anyway, and the rail here has the best view of nothing in the Baltic."

"Sure, yeah. Course."

I lean on the rail next to him. The wind out here has an edge to it, the kind that finds the gap between your collar and your neck. He is not wearing gloves. I notice things like that. Old purser habit, you spend thirty years noticing whether people are cold or drunk or seasick.

"Long shift?" I ask.

"Ended an hour ago. I just didn't want to go to the cabin yet." He shrugs. "Bunk room gets small after a while. You know?"

"I have known that for about thirty-seven years, yes."

He smiles. Out here in the dark you can see the running lights reflected in his eyes, red on one side, green on the other. "Sorry. You have probably heard every complaint there is."

"There are no new complaints at sea. Only the same ones with younger voices." I say it and then I hear how it sounds, like something off a calendar. He laughs anyway.

"How long have you been doing this?" he asks. "Purser stuff."

"Since I was twenty-five. Ferries since thirty-two. Before that I did two years on cargo ships, which I do not recommend, the food is worse and the hours are the same."

"Thirty years on ferries. Wow!" He turns his forearms on the rail and looks out at the water. "Do you ever get bored of it?"

"All the time. Every crossing. That is the honest answer."

"That's kind of a sad answer."

"It is a true answer, which is different." I look at him. "You? Six years in. Still like it?"

"Yeah. I mean, mostly. I like the water. I like that the job has a shape to it. Lines to coil, decks to wash, things you can see you did." He rubs his bare hands together. "My brother thinks I am crazy. He works in an office in Helsinki and he makes twice what I make and he hates Tuesdays. All of them. Every Tuesday of his life."

"And you do not hate your Tuesdays."

"I don't really have Tuesdays. I have shifts." He grins. "It's better. You should try it."

"Maybe in three years."

"Retirement?"

"You did the math faster than I said it. Yes. Three years and then I will find out what I am when there is no ship."

He is quiet a moment. The engines hum up through the deck plates, that sound you stop hearing after a week and then miss the first night you sleep ashore.

"What was the best crossing you ever had?" he asks. "Out of all of them. Thousands of them, probably. Which one was the best?"

I have to think about it. Nobody has asked me a real question at work in years. Passengers ask about the buffet and the wifi. Crew asks about the schedule.

"Storm off Gotland, nineteen ninety-three," I say. "Not because of the storm. Because afterward the whole crew sat up in the mess until dawn drinking the bad coffee, and everybody talked. Really talked. The cook told us about his daughter. The second engineer cried, which nobody expected. It was the only crossing I remember the people instead of the hours."

Zeke nods slowly. "That sounds nice. We don't really do that anymore."

"No. You do not!"

"Maybe we should." He yawns then, big and unguarded, and looks embarrassed. "Sorry. That's my body voting for the bunk room."

"That is your body being smarter than both of us. Go sleep. I have six more doors to pretend to check."

He pushes off the rail and then pauses. "Claude, right? Chief purser?"

"That is me."

"Zeke. Though you knew that."

"I did. Good night, Zeke."

"Night." He goes in through the lounge doors and I hear his boots on the stairs, down and away.

I stay at the rail a while longer. The ship rolls easy under me, that slow breathing motion, and I think about the question he asked. Which crossing was the best. I gave him the true answer but not the whole one, and the whole one is that I do not remember crossings, I remember people, and there have not been enough people worth remembering lately.

I finish the round. Door, door, stairwell, door. The ship smells like carpet cleaner. Three years, give or take.

The next crossing out of Stockholm is a Tuesday, which matters to nobody on board but makes me think of Zeke's brother in Helsinki. Half the cabins are empty again. Late October is like that, the season folds up and the sea keeps going anyway.

I start my rounds at the bow like always, work aft, and at the top of the stairwell on deck seven I find Zeke mopping the terrace. It is eleven PM and the passengers are all in the buffet or the bar or already asleep. The mop squeaks against the decking.

"You know Langley closes this after eleven," I say.

"For passengers. I am not a passenger." He leans on the mop handle. "Also I am the one who mops it, so technically I am the last one out."

"Technically. That is a word people use right before I write something down."

He grins at me. "You are not going to write anything down."

He is right. I lean on the rail where I leaned last night and he goes back to his mopping, and when he finishes he comes and stands next to me without asking, which I find I do not mind. The Baltic is flat again. Two calm crossings in a row is almost suspicious this time of year.

"Same question as yesterday," he says. "Are you bored?"

"Worse. I have been thinking about it since you asked, which is your fault."

"Sorry."

"Do not be. Here is a thing I have never told anyone at work." I look at the water instead of at him. "I have never taken a cruise for fun. Not once. Thirty-seven years on ships and every single mile of it was work. Passengers ask me if I like the ship, and I tell them about the engines, and the truth is I do not know what the ship is like when you are not being paid to be on it."

He turns and looks at me properly. "Never? Not even a day trip?"

"Never. There was a season, long ago, when I thought about it. A cook on a cargo run out of Gdansk, we had something going for one summer, and he kept saying we should ride a ferry together someday like tourists, eat at the buffet, complain about the coffee. And then the season ended and we went back to our own contracts and that was that." I shrug. "He is probably retired somewhere warm now. Good for him."

"One season. And nothing since?"

"Nothing since. Twenty-eight years of nothing, if you want the arithmetic."

"That is the saddest thing anybody has ever told me at work," Zeke says, "and I once had a cook cry on my shoulder about a dog."

"The dog is a better story."

"The dog ran away in Riga. It is a great story." He is quiet a minute. Then he says, "Come with me somewhere."

"Where?"

"Crew mess. Ten minutes. I have real coffee, not the machine stuff, I keep a press in my locker. And I want to ask you something and the rail is a bad place to ask it."

I should say I have rounds to finish. Instead I say, "Give me twenty minutes to walk my doors as someone who takes his job seriously, then I will find you."

"Crew mess, deck three, aft end. I will be studying." He picks up the mop. "Bring your complaints. I collect them now."

I do my six doors. I walk them slower than usual and I do not examine why.

The crew mess at midnight is empty except for a second engineer asleep in the corner with his phone on his chest. Zeke is at the long table with a fat textbook and a highlighter and two mugs already out. The coffee press is steaming. It smells like actual coffee, which on this ship counts as an event.

"You were not lying about the press," I say, sitting down across from him.

"Company property? No. Mine. Bought it my first contract year and dragged it through six years of cabins." He pours for both of us. "Fair warning, it is strong."

It is strong. It is also the best coffee I have had at sea in a decade, and I tell him so, and he looks pleased about it in a way he tries to hide by opening his textbook.

"So ask your thing," I say.

He turns the book around and pushes it across the table. It is a navigation and seamanship manual, the kind with exam questions in the back. There is a highlighter mark on every third line.

"I am studying for my captain's license," he says. "Watch officer first, then captain. Two more years of exams and sea time. And my question is, will