Counting Songs

“You’re counting ghosts,” Chris says. He doesn’t look up from the screen. He’s leaning over the hydrophone array, his shoulder brushing the condensation on the porthole glass. “That’s a third blue. Maybe a fourth. You’re going to inflate the population density by twenty percent if you keep calling every sub-harmonic a distinct individual.”

I am in the only cabin on the *RV Albatross*, a steel box no larger than a closet, wedged between the engine room and the comms array. The air smells of diesel and stale coffee. I am thirty-four, and I am currently losing my mind. Chris is thirty-six, the lead visual acoustician for the Lisbon lab, and he is occupying the narrow bunk above the equipment rack, his legs dangling down to tap against my knee every time he shifts his weight.

We are stuck here because the sky opened up two hours ago, turning the Atlantic swell into a churning gray bruise, and the captain ordered all recording lines kept tight. We have one bed. We have one job. And we have three weeks of contradictory data to sort through.