1
“I’VE GOT IT … Gabe, I’ve got it.” Peter Kosydar’s voice cracked excitedly as he picked up the remnants of the cardboard insert of a T-shirt. He uncapped a marker and started to scrawl, bumping into the table with the model on it along the way.
Gabriel Nemo grabbed on to the edge of the glass-topped desk Peter had bumped into and steadied the table. A two-inch G.I. Joe figure of a US Marine toppled over, and Gabriel righted it again. The Marine figure sat in a little cardboard captain’s chair in the center of a model they’d been cobbling together from whatever they could get their hands on in their room for hours. Ever since Peter had woken Gabriel up in the middle of the night with inspiration—a lot of inspirations, in fact. They’d set to work immediately.
Little bits of plastic and cardboard littered the desk around the model. In cardboard miniature lay the bridge of the submarine Obscure. Its floor was an oval cut from the T-shirt cardboard. The faceplate of their only room clock, detached and held up by toothpicks, indicated the view screen at the front.
Peter tapped the cardboard he was drawing on and picked up a pair of scissors. Over his shoulder, warm sunlight speckled the surface of the water outside the Nemo Institute, just over the horizon from California. The sight of the choppy blue and a distant dolphin leaping and diving warmed Gabriel’s heart, and he looked back at Peter, who was cutting out long rectangles along which he had scrawled the numbers 3.5' on the side and 5' across the top.
“What are those?”
“Walls.”
“In the middle of the bridge?”
Peter pushed back his glasses. His blond hair was matted and irregular, as though he were wearing a crown of straw. He placed the pieces of cardboard behind the sections of the bridge. “We’ve got the room. We already decided we’ll take a lot of equipment and put it in the new egress hatch next to your captain’s chair.”
“Yeah, but we might need more room for that,” Gabriel said. “How am I gonna spin around?” Gabriel turned the Marine sitting in the captain’s chair and had to stop. “See? My legs hit this new wall over the egress hatch.”
“So maybe it’s just the hatch there,” Peter answered. “Plus, seriously, the cardboard is not to scale; that action figure’s legs look about seven feet long.”
That seemed right. Gabriel moved the action figure over by the view screen and saw that, indeed, the sizes were all wrong. “Okay, so tell me about the walls.”
“We have a five-foot-long wall behind Misty’s station and another behind mine.” Peter pointed. “The walls are three and a half feet tall, two feet thick. I say we make them hollow. So we can open them up and use them.”
“As … shelves?”
“Yeah. Yeah!” Gabriel looked down. He kicked a stray shoe aside as he circled the table. The shoe landed somewhere with a soft wallop. The room was a disaster, uniform pants and shirts strewn over every possible ledge, unrecognizable crumbs dotting every surface. Peter had covered the walls with movie posters that stretched back a hundred years, such that their friend Misty had said it looked like a movie theater snack bar that hadn’t been cleaned in years. That didn’t mean anything to Gabriel. But he loved it. “We could store emergency supplies right there. That way in a pinch we wouldn’t need to run back to the dive room.”
“And a bigger refrigerator could go in the little wall the Marine hit his legs on,” Peter added.
Gabriel nodded. That was a great idea. The cooler he had to the right of his chair now was a poor excuse for storage if they were gone for days—even though a long trip like that was rare.
So far they’d covered changes to the view screen, communications equipment, and flooring, and now they were all the way into storage.
“It’s amazing,” Gabriel said. “I thought the design was perfect when we rolled out the Obscure.” That was a year ago.
“Well, you didn’t have a crew to give you more ideas.”
Gabriel folded his arms over his navy-blue T-shirt. “I guess that’s true.”
“And,” Peter said, “we can decorate the shelves.” He looked up. “You know?”
“Decorate it? Like with The Blob posters?”
“What, there’s a Nemo regulation against Technicolor? Sure! Misty’s, too.” Peter moved over next to Gabriel and indicated her station. “Oh,” he said abruptly as though just getting an idea. He turned around and ran to the corner of the room, rummaging through a stack of school papers. He came back with two tiny pieces of colored paper, which he rolled into balls, one pink and one green. He put the pink ball on the cardboard that indicated Misty’s station on the Obscure—ops and weapons—and the green on the floor behind her spot. He picked up a Sharpie and quickly drew a long rectangle. “Imagine there’s a wall there.”
“What’s the pink…?”
“It’s the Troll doll,” Peter said. Misty had stuck a wild-haired doll to her station a few weeks ago.
Gabriel snorted because he loved that the Troll was now built into their model. “What’s the green ball?”
“It’s a plant,” Peter said. “Haven’t you seen her room? She has plants.”
“Sure, okay.” Gabriel ran his fingers through his hair. “But how are you gonna secure a plant when we go into a steep dive?”
Peter smirked. “I don’t know, Gabe, but you’ve got antique globes in your study, so I’m sure we can learn from that.” Since they had started traveling together months ago—even before they had created the Nemo Institute—Peter had been a natural at navigating the Obscure. Which was pretty remarkable when you considered that on land, Peter was afraid of water. Like deathly afraid, so afraid he couldn’t even drink it. But he was at home on the bridge.
Gabriel stepped back, looking at the model. “So, walls. Is it…”
“What?” Peter was hunched over and stood up.
“I mean, is it bridgelike?”
“Bridgelike?” Peter asked. “It’s your bridge. Our bridge, if you don’t mind. We kinda get to say what’s bridgelike. Oh, and did I mention you’ve already got your own study? It looks like a Sherlock Holmes movie in there, how bridgelike is that?”
“Guys!” Misty Jensen pushed the door open, looking in. “Hey!”
“Door!” Gabriel and Peter said at the same time. Peter waved his hands wildly. “We could be changing in here.”
Misty leaned in the doorway and rolled her eyes. She was wearing her school uniform, a green tunic over black pants. She looked impatient. “Do you realize you missed—what’s that?” She ran over to the model. “This is the bridge?”
Peter nodded. “With some improvements.”
Copyright © 2020 by Jason Henderson
