Kevin digs at the ocean with the rudder. He snapped it from the tiller while the sun was up. He is wet past his forearms.
Nina sits at the bow of the boat, out of his way, with nothing in her hands to correct the circle Kevin spins them in. She marvels quietly at the stars. Rather than dwell on her hangover - embedded like an axe in her forehead - she fills her mind with memories of night sermons with her mother, how their church lit entire cases of candles along the pews. The stars make Nina feel holy.
Earlier that day, after waking to empty sails that Kevin forgot to close, Nina paced the length of the boat - 20 feet, though she stretched it to hundreds - holding her phone out to get reception. Fatigued, Nina shut the phone off at four percent and stashed it in her pocket. She calmed and watched the sun set on the horizon. Nina recognized how the water stilled to glass, how the ocean mirrored the sky so that every direction seemed a continuum instead of a boundary. Rather than disappear behind a solid mass, the sun shut like an eye - first to oblong, then to almond, then to sleep.
Nina tried including Kevin on the spectacle. Instead, he invested in flipping the boom back and forth to make enough wind to propel them. All it did was force Nina to hold down her hair.
“Kevin,” she said, “You’re missing it.”
“I can figure this out,” he replied, panting, “I can get us out of here.”
“Kevin,” she said, “Look in front of you.”
He looked in despair at the sail.
“Kevin,” she said.
“Nina!” he snapped. He knew he made a mistake.
Nina waited. “Should I be helping?”
“Just keep the phone ready.”
As Kevin digs at the ocean - crude oil black, same as the night - his ripples shake the reflecting surface and return it to sea. He misses the arrangement of his living room, his standing speakers propped in every corner - for immersive sound - and his high definition television - set to lifelike. Exhausted, he begins to accept how far that room is. He sits with Nina on the bow.
“Any service?” Kevin asks.
Nina shrugs. “It was no service then, it will be no service the three feet you paddled us, and it will still be no service over there.” She points at the closest ripple, made visible by the network of stars overhead.
“Then what do we do?” Kevin asks.
“Look.”
As the ripple echoes to its end, the mirror returns, and the sky joins the sea to suspend the boat in cosmos. Like floating through the stars, Kevin cannot believe it. He thought he understood panoramas from the fifty five inches of screen in his living room. He sees now he’d been cheated, how none of that compares to finding this center of the universe.
As Kevin drifts into a trance, Nina suggests, “I guess we could have a look at the phone, but it will probably drop us another percent. Should we save it for later?”
Kevin, slow in hearing her, weighs their options. Rather than answer, he inches toward the edge of the bow, but stops before seeing his reflection.
From the edge, and from any direction he chooses, the stars offer to swallow him whole.
“Play a song,” he says.
