By Shena McAuliffe
“Would the humans come for this tremendous thing they had lost? Would they come for the copper wires, the batteries, the rubber tires? Would they send robot emissaries from their bright, dry world above?”
1.
In February, Felicity Ace was speeding across the bright Atlantic south of the Azores when somewhere in her cargo hold (no one saw it happen) a spark ignited and grew into a flame. Soon Felicity Ace was burning, smoke billowing and tangling in the sky like the windblown hair of a fairytale witch. The smoke was white, but it blackened the paint around Felicity Ace’s shoulders, which had been pale and stalwart back when she set sail from Emden, Germany two weeks prior, headed for the tiny snip of coast called Rhode Island. Felicity Ace was a cosmopolitan ship, built in Japan and flying the flag of Panama, sailing since 2005.
The Portuguese Navy used ropes and straps and baskets to evacuate her crew of 22 humans, lifting them into the air and onto a helicopter, the blades of which ruffled the surface of the ocean in a wide circular patch. Working from other boats and other helicopters, firefighters tried and failed, tried again and failed again, to extinguish the flames. And so, for a week, alone and emptied of her people, Felicity Ace drifted and burned, burned and drifted.
Emptied of people, but she was full of expensive, custom cars that waited on her many decks. Porsches, Audis, Mercedes Benzes, and Bentleys gleamed from headlights to tailpipes, cars that had not yet been driven on an open road. Every engine spotless, these cars had been built to hum on Autobahns and interstates, to wend along seaside cliffs and between hillsides thick with olive groves and grapevines, everything glistening under the sun. Waiting, the cars dreamt of the chignoned ladies they had been promised they would one day hold in the soft palms of their leather seats, women with graceful arms and white teeth and big, dark sunglasses, women with silk scarfs tied over their hair. The cars dreamt of the gloved hands that would one day grip their steering wheels, and the gentle but insistent pressure of loafered feet that would coax them to ever-faster speeds.
But adrift on the blue ocean, Felicity Ace burned, and the Portuguese harbormaster blamed the cars. Most likely, the fire had been started by their lithium-ion hearts, he said, by the burning hot dreams of the electric cars.
A week passed, and the smoke subsided, and a group of salvage workers descended onto Felicity Ace’s deck, lowered from the air, and crept from level to level, looking for flames. Finding none, the pronounced that the fire was out, and they hitched a pair of tugboats to the ship to pull her in to harbor, where workers could scavenge what was left of her, and what was salvageable from the cars. But Felicity Ace wanted none of this drag-tail humiliation. She did not want to be sliced and picked and scraped to her bones, did not want this slow spectacle of disassembly. Charred and exhausted, she began to list starboard. And then, seemingly all at once, she tilted firmly and went down all at once and disappeared into the sea, cars and all.
Felicity Ace was a 650-foot roll-on/roll-off (Ro-Ro) Cargo Ship carrying 4000 custom cars, 2200 tons of fuel, and 2200 tons of oil. Together, ship and cargo sank 3000 meters to the bottom of the ocean.
2.
A shadow had drifted overhead for two weeks, but now the sun slanted through the water again, its rays refracting through plankton and algae for a few hundred meters, casting prisms through schools of fish who flashed their sleek fins. Deeper down, the ocean remained as dark as always, and Felicity Ace sank and through the blackness. She stirred up sand and grit that swirled, then settled again, around and upon her body that was so much bigger than the bodies of the sharks or whales that occasionally came to rest at the bottom of the ocean after the animals died. Beneath Felicity Ace, the ocean floor compacted. Sea cucumbers, worms, moss animals, deep-sea octopuses, shrimp, anglerfish: some of these were crushed beneath the ship, but others swam or drifted until Felicity Ace settled, and then they quietly returned.
Would the humans come for this tremendous thing they had lost? Would they come for the copper wires, the lithium-ion batteries, the rubber tires? Would they send robot emissaries from their bright, dry world above? Could machinery even function here in the deep dark quiet, two miles down, at the bottom of the ocean? Saltwater licked the lost human things like lozenges, but would the human things ever dissolve?
The ship waited. The cars waited. The starfish and sea cucumbers waited, but in the meantime, they explored the smooth surfaces of the ship and the cars. They crawled over the charred flanks and squeezed into the seams of doors and trunks and hoods. An octopus took refuge in the underbelly of a Bentley. The metal and fiberglass and plastic, the wires and buttons and glass belonged to the sea creatures now.
One day, in a time unimaginable to us humans and inconceivable to the deep-sea creatures that crawled and swam over and under and into the ship, saltwater and tentacles might wear through the tanks and tubes of the human-made machines. The sealed tanks and batteries might, in seeps or gushes, leak their chemical bile and blood through pinholes and cracks. They might release their toxic fluids, their heavy metals. Or maybe the machines will somehow hold their poisons tight.
In a wish, a dream, a figment beyond us, Felicity Ace forgets her name and how she once traveled on the bright surface of the sea. She becomes a new and softer thing—a reef, a playground, an undersea garden. A mothership blooming in a dark, unknowable, untouchable world.
I consider this piece a hybrid of fairy tale and essay. In part 1, I hew closely to the news story that inspired my writing, an incident that took place in February 2022. Speculation (or imagination) sneaks in immediately when I personify the ship. In part 1, I also establish a fairytale tone and the narrative distance that allows me to speculate more boldly later in the essay. In part 2, I imagine the unseen, long-term fate of the ship and the ecosystem that it disturbs and settles within. The Felicity Ace sank to a depth of about 3000 meters, which is the Bathypelagic zone, where the only light sources are bioluminescent animals and bacteria, but this is also the zone in which there is the most sea life. At this point, it hasn't been verified whether the cars or the ship have leaked oil or other toxins, but this seems an inevitable eventuality. In the dismay I felt when I read about the Felicity Ace, I let myself imagine this human-caused disaster outlasting us until it becomes something beautiful, along the lines of the abundance of wildlife now living in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, or the coral reefs that thrive on ancient shipwrecks. Corals can live as far down as 6000 meters, but most reefs grow at shallower depths, in places where the sunlight reaches, no deeper than 50 meters below the surface, so this speculation seems an impossible dream. Within the piece, I openly acknowledgement that this is a desperate sort of wish—that the non-human world might recover from the damage we have wrought—is what allows me to still think of this piece as nonfiction, as an essay that first documents an event and then traces the movement of my thoughts through both research and speculative imagination.
Shena McAuliffe is the author of the novel The Good Echo, the essay collection Glass Light Electricity, and a collection of short stories, We Are a Teeming Wilderness, winner of the Press 53 Prize for Short Fiction and forthcoming in May 2023. She is an Assistant Professor of Fiction at Union College in Schenectady, New York.