Tomorrow Ye Will Get Your Pay

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It’s 2057, and after abruptly abandoning his teaching career, Marcus Ashton takes a temporary gig to make rent: working as a historical interpreter on a reproduction whaling vessel in New Bedford, Massachusetts. His boss hands him a costume that he’s not allowed to wash, a set of whale facts to memorize, and a journal written by Amos Cudjoe— a whaleman from two centuries ago. Wearing a historical skin helps Marcus feel alive on a planet that seems increasingly dead, but soon the line between past and present begins to blur.

In 1867, Amos Cudjoe, born a free man, signs on to a second voyage on the whaling bark Wampanoag for a four-year hunt. Amos is content to keep his head down and collect his 1/75th share of the ship’s profits, so that he can marry the woman he hopes is waiting for his return. But then he meets Tobey— a young man recently freed by the Civil War, looking for something that going to sea can’t give him. Amos, desperate for a friend to share the long journey with, swears to help Tobey survive (and, more importantly, come home with his full pay.) But the whaling ship is a dangerous place in its relentless pursuit of oil— a microcosm of the whole world, shrunk down to just the 120’ of the deck.

While the deadly autoclave-heat of the summer presses down on New Bedford, the imagined Amos rises inside Marcus as a hungry ghost, and everything in Marcus’s life begins to collapse. 

It’s not clear that either Marcus or Amos will survive the pressures of the ocean and the weight of history— and if they do, what kind of wages they’ll live to collect.