9.2.09
The men in acrobatics of sleeplessness awaken me. Outside, it’s raining. I go outside and the darkness makes me think of a game’s variation: Rock beats scissors; scissors beat paper; night beats both. The drops pain me in the manner of a femme fatale’s bite-kisses. I look at my hands and the fingers that write these accounts and plot this course. Something bad is coming, not a mutiny in the visible sense but a secret battle that I might only record using invisible ink. The men want to know where we’re going; I cannot say for more than one reason. I think of my ex-wives and how long they endured my scheming. I should have let The Bastard have his way with them for all my intimacy: nothing of me to share but dreams that go nowhere, in which I try to complete some puzzle that might be found in a Tokyo Internet cafe. The rain keeps kissing and biting and the only love I know is that which I can bear to possess for myself, immeasurable for its paucity. The moon seems to have left the scene of my crimes. What poor lighting for a film. With that thought, the sky is illuminated. The airship ruins the nostalgia for which it was chosen, resmbling a Goodyear blimp, hardly a dirigible at all as it signals in big bright dots an advertisement of sorts: “MY NAME IS GODOT…DO NOT WAIT FOR ME.” The blimp turns course. It leaves me like my wives, with a sacked definition that contains only meaningless syllables.
10.2.09
Back in the cabin, I ruminate. The day was a disaster, and the time is coming when I must explain not only the true mission but its impossibility of being fulfilled. I dare not return to shore now. I wonder if I might invent some new mission. Perhaps we’ll find a port and purchase fishing equipment. Then again, these are no fishermen. They’re ex-convicts or should be and their only outdoor experience tends to involve drug running. What could I expect from the advertisement I posted? “Wanted: Reckless men for wayward travels.”
You get what you pay for. I haven’t paid much. I suspect I’m going to pay in ways costlier than wages. I don’t care about money, but what I had is gone, up above in Captain X’s pocket, wherever he went, and in all that camera equipment he took with him. Perhaps I should have listened when he said, “It’s the Pacific you want,” but those reproductions of maps overcame all reason, triggering some weird mysticism I had long ago thought put down like a wild dog.
Now we’re in the Atlantic, unmonitored, without any means of contact beyond Morse code signals. Wait: someone just went aboard and kicked out a light. The Bastard. Here he comes, down stairs creaking in cliche. We’re lost, but one of us — me — is more lost than the rest.
17.2.09
Fenshaw is a friend of mine, and it’s lucky I have a single friend aboard this ship of thieves. Not that Fenshaw isn’t a thief, but he’s only a pickpocket and I’ve nothing in mine. He’s a pockmarked “kid,” thirty-five going on fifteen and given to covering his face by whatever gesture avails itself. I often feel the need to advise Fenshaw, but right now, I’m depending on him. For what, I’m not sure. It’s the morning after my slumberless night and I’m shaky as a bum too bitched up to beg. He knocked on the cabin door as if I’d called for him. He sat across from me, a psychiatrist on the prowl. I’ve known him so many years that he must have heard my distress without my bothering to signal it. “Thank you, Fenshaw,” I thought, but I couldn’t say it; something in me detests thank yous of any kind. They remind me of Mother forcing me to write thank you cards to cheap relatives.
Fenshaw said, “There won’t be a mutiny. I convinved the men you know what you’re doing. And I told them the documentary angle, only I lied. I said there’s cameras hidden all over the place and they should mind what they’re saying. No they’re obsessed with appearing on television or in the movies. They’ll follow you anywhere now. No need to say, ‘Thank you.’ I know better than that.”
“Did you ever think, Fenshaw, that I might have a place in mind after all, one I almost deny to myself because it seems impossible? Or that I’m chasing secondary plans? Or inventing new ones because I’ve lost faith in the original conception?”
“I’ve never suspected otherwise.”
“And you know what I’m talking about?”
18.2.09
“Nobody knows what you’re talking about,” Fenshaw said. “And I don’t want to know.”
“Yes.”
We process the sun and the beautiful water plains below. We’ve been expelled from the land and declared sea-solar. To the multiple mythologies of water and light, we pay reverence. We search for pieces of dead gods, from the Aztecs to the Mayans. The dead, the ocean, the sun, all the way back to funerary Africa. In our loneliness, Fenshaw and I await water goddesses and mermaids. We long to feel their wet bodies in our arms. I know it’s true, for Fenshaw’s eyes change color without reference to light; they are dreaming for him.
19.2.09
“Your eyes change color for no reason, Fenshaw.”
“They tell me that…the girls.”
“They must think you’re some kind of sorcerer.”
“That I’m not or I wouldn’t be here. Not that I don’t care for you. I like you a lot, for a captain, a man of authority.”
“You’re joking.”
“If I am, the joke’s on me, too. Don’t feel badly about it.”
“I never do.”
I had to ask him something so important that I didn’t care to know the answer. I hoped our goddesses and mermaids might interrupt, but the sea looked solid, now, as if one might ice skate upon it to Europe.
“Eh — Sprague and Turnbull. Are they still up to –”
Fenshaw shook his head.
“They won’t dive?” I said.
“Not now, but only because they’ve no reason to believe there’s anything to dive to, besides the bottom of the ocean. Is that where you’re taking us?”
“No, only them. If they’ll go. You think they might change their minds?”
“That depends.”
“Everything depends on something else. Come on, shit your ghost.”
“I already told you; it all depends whether there’s something down there.”
I hadn’t brought cigarettes. I thought my time on the ship might prove a good time to quit. It wasn’t. I gestured as if I did have a cigarette and puffed air. Mist rolled from my lips, but it wasn’t carcinogenic enough.
“There’s something down there,” I said, finally admitting it to myself as much as Fenshaw.
21.2.09
The morning had slipped through the night’s curatins like a thief, and despite all that had transpired, I only now realized the men must have finally fallen asleep; it was well past time for their various duties, of which they had few.
I said to Fenshaw, “Awake the divers and bring them to me.”
As Fenshaw left, a Titanic urge came upon me, but I saw no icebergs. Something in me wanted this action to end, this story to sink, my life to blur into the inescapable cliches of aging. Soon, I would put away childish things. Or that’s what the world wants. But I am constructed of childish things. Should I dismantle myself? And if so, what shall I become? No, I embrace childish things: the dictatorial rant; the question and answer routine of “You know what?” “What?” “Nothing”; the awakening to each day thinking that something spectacular was owed to me that would at last be granted.
The divers arrived. I returned to practical matters in a mood full of rabid dogs.
22.2.09
Their minds twisted like swastikas, Sprague and Turnbull resembled one another in a single manner: They both wore black scarves, even when it was warm as springtime with Hitler. Otherwise, they’re fascists without feathers who flock together, Sprague muscular and Turnbull lacking any build whatsoever. I had the feeling Turnbull had taken a few beatings from Sprague and that I might face the same humiliation. I no longer cared. A rightously-accepted beating, defended against with what little fighting skill I possessed, might do a lot for my morale.
“Why must you call me on deck without reason?” Sprague said. “I’m hungover.”
“I,” Turnbull said, “feel like a pile of Jews.”
“That’s enough,” I said. “We’ve Jews aboard this ship. Leave your borrowed nostalgia at home. I should have known better than to hire suspiciously-bald young Germans.”
“You should have known a lot of things,” Turnbull said.
“Don’t try and turn the tables on me,” I said, banging the table and immediately grabbing my thumb. “I’m no fool. I know where we’re going. I forgot, that’s all. I suffer from amnesia.”
“Then don’t forget,” Sprague said, “that we’ve no alarm clocks. It’s in our contract. Perhaps you might consider how genuine your generosity really is before offering it.”
“I’ll offer it when I like, and whether I mean it or not’s none of your business.”
Sprague bent his arm and sent his bicep bulging. “You might make a good German in the end,” he said, “if you can get yourself one of these.”
23.2.09
“I don’t need muscles,” I said, “especially when I’m feeling — how would you put it — nihilistic.”
For not-so-good measure, I grabbed Turnbull andtossed him into the sea.
“That wasn’t too pleasant,” Spague said. “But I don’t like little dogs licking my boots. You’re lucky I hate him.”
“Nobody calls me ‘lucky,’” I said.
I punched Sprague in the stomach.
Sprague smiled. “That tickles.”
“Now that the dirigible’s gone, only I know where we are. Don’t bother trying to beat it out of me. We’re still lost; it’s a matter of how lost. We’re not that lost, but you’ll find yourself completely lost without me. I can’t explain how I know my way around the water.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve a genius for navigation, but it comes and goes.”
“Like your memory?”
“Exactly.”
On cue, Sprague lit a cigarette. His type always knows when to light a cigarette. Once the cigarette was lit, he hardly bothered smoking. He was the guy in the movies who takes his glasses off to better see a suspect: a beyond-pointless gesture. Besides, I already knew what Sprague would next say.
We waited for “Action!” while Turnbull gulped and yelled, yelled and gulped. There was something funny about that. I never claimed I’m a good man. Not a particularly good one, anyway.
“That’s twice the cut for me, then,” Sprague said.
“Of course.” Killing a man had served as my beating, and I felt better now. Sprague’s muscles were better saved for the heavy lifting he would perform later.
“There he goes.”
Turnbull’s head dropped out of ripples’ center.
“Why’s it so funny?” I said.
“‘That son of bitch has got it worse than me’ is probably how it goes, wouldn’t you say?”
“Yes, that’s roughly how I’d say it.”
“Well,” Sprague said, “I need a nap.”
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