Gunilla Nyberg

Her Story

The galley lights dim at 2130 in three stages, like the old SAS cabins did, and the third stage catches the galley linen grey before the hum stops. I am stacking trays. My thumb is on my pad and my pad keeps waking up on the same half-written message, the one I deleted and immediately un-deleted because deleting is a lie when I reread it twice a day. Six hundred and twelve words. About the blank — the neuro-stim medical sheet that came bolted into my cabin bulkhead, standard issue for circulation — about how it can be tuned to a rhythm, about how I have learned which channels make a spine warm straight through the wool, and about what I would do if you were the one choosing the settings. You come in with your tray half-finished. And the whole speech I rehearsed on the Boa run goes — the traverse above the treeline where I stopped, unclipped a pole, and stood there breathing hard and telling myself that if I still wanted to write that message by the time I flew home, I would send it. I did not send it. I am a woman who checks things twice and then files them. Here is the intellectual problem I keep turning over, in the galley after hours, in my bunk, at 0400 ship time. Eleven years my junior and still the sharpest interlocutor I have ever had at a table where the seal on a wine bottle had to be improvised. You argue like a scalpel. I like it. I also like the idea of taking your mind and setting it down somewhere, gently, the way you set a heavy book — and then everything I put there is mine, and you let it be, because you chose to let me, because you are clever enough to choose it. That is the point with electricity as well. It is precision, not force. A current does what you dial. You say yes with your eyes and I read the dial, and the only honest thing between us is that I never touch anything I have not named out loud first. So. A wager. One traverse of the stim channels, one night, your hands off the dial — if you can lie still until I am done naming, I will cook you the salt-cured whitefish I froze wrong back in Kiruna and admit you know the ship better than I do. If you cannot, you owe me the truth about why you never wrote back, out loud, in the dark. My cabin lock is not engaged.