Manhattan Beach

by Jennifer Egan

  “No talkee, no eatee,” Farmingdale decreed, looking around for participants in the hazing. “We’ll see how long he stays mum.”

  When Eddie tried again to hand the bosun his share, Farmingdale seized his wrist. “You’re soft, Third. He was never soft with you.”

  “We need every man strong,” Eddie said.

  “He doesn’t move a muscle. Doesn’t matter if he’s strong or weak. Doesn’t matter if he’s here at all.”

  He was offering Eddie a role in a provocation that would satisfy the collective need of a scapegoat. Not a man aboard the Elizabeth Seaman had failed to see the bosun humiliate Eddie. Now the bosun was a broken man, the last vestige of his pride his apparent indifference to their present conversation. Eddie had always wanted to best the bosun, but the prospect of doing so now, in allegiance with Farmingdale, repelled him.

  “Leave him alone, Second,” he said severely, and handed the bosun his milk.

  Farmingdale looked from Eddie to the bosun and back again. The whimsical smile played at his lips. “I see how it is,” he said.

  From that moment forward, Farmingdale began to follow Eddie—if one man could be said to “follow” another in their constrained circumstances. Wherever Eddie was, the courtly, snowy-haired second mate was directly beside him. It was a hostile pursuit—a surveillance—beneath which Eddie sensed Farmingdale’s fear that Eddie might turn on him and persuade others to do the same. The prospect, which hadn’t occurred to him before, began to tempt him.

  That afternoon, he cut off the dangling end of his leather belt and gave it to Sparks, who had been using a rag to bait the lifeboat’s hook and line. With the leather as bait, Sparks managed to hook a small tuna just before sundown. Eddie helped him wrestle the fish alongside the lifeboat, and Bogues drove his hunting knife into its heart. Eddie leaped overboard and helped to get a line around its tail, and they dragged the fish over the gunwale onto the boat. Farmingdale sliced it into portions, which they distributed using a method whereby a man with his back turned chose the recipient of each. There was enough for each man to have two large portions, and the liquid inside the fish quenched thirst as well as hunger. Afterward, the distrust among them seemed to melt away. They lit the kerosene lamp and talked into the night about what they would do after the war. When everyone had fallen into a sleepy, sated silence, the bosun touched Eddie’s bicep, gestured at the fish carcass lying on a thwart, and spoke so softly that no one else heard. Eddie doubted it himself a moment later.

  “Good,” the bosun said.

  * * *

  After three more days, windless except for the cruel, teasing zephyrs, hunger and thirst returned with redoubled viciousness. They pulled buttons from their clothing and sucked them to waken their saliva. Eddie’s tongue lay in his mouth like shoe leather; he would have liked to cut it out. On day six without wind, Hummel and Addison gulped seawater with such luxuriant bliss that Eddie had to shout at the others not to do the same. By evening both men were hallucinating, and Hummel was dead the following morning, his stomach distended. When they’d rolled him into the sea, Addison informed Eddie that Hummel had left him his rations, as a last will and testament. When Eddie replied that it was not in Hummel’s power to do so, Addison came at him with fists raised. Farmingdale was beside Eddie, as usual, but he did nothing to fend off Addison; it was the gunners who held him back. He was dead by evening. Before moving onto the raft to sleep (Farmingdale following to snore at his side), Eddie made another notch in the log of days he was keeping on the lifeboat thwart, with a special mark for each man who had died.

  On the seventh day of no wind—tenth overall—Eddie lay on the raft at sunset, savoring the fragment of relief between the agony of heat and the agony of cold. He felt wind on his cheek for several seconds before the sensation registered, and even then he assumed it was another dream of wind. For days they’d moved only just enough to keep the kinks out of their knees, and all of them were slow to react. But this was unmistakably wind—a squall that had appeared so suddenly that the sluggish lookouts failed to note it. There was a collective shout of jubilation. On the lifeboat, Pugh and others pulled in the sea anchor and began preparing the sail. Already the sea was growing choppy. Bogues leaped back onto the boat and began seizing other men’s hands to pull them from the raft so it could be released. As Roger was pushing off from raft to boat, the painter connecting them snapped, and he dropped into the sea, smacking his face on the lifeboat’s gunwale as he fell. Bogues lowered an oar for the cadet to grab, but Roger seemed to panic, and flailed back toward the raft. Eddie jumped in and lifted him onto it. The cadet’s face was a garish white, cut along one cheekbone.

  The raft, meanwhile, was being blown away from the boat with remarkable speed—it hadn’t any draft. Bogues tried to toss Eddie another line, but it kept falling short. They gave up when a downpour began. Farmingdale appeared immobilized. Eddie ordered the men still on the raft to swim to the boat in pairs, so those on board would have time to pull them in. To his surprise, he saw the bosun helping to lift swimmers from the waves, his first activity since they’d rescued him.

  Farmingdale refused to swim. Eddie meant to go last with Roger, who lay on the raft with eyes closed, bleeding from the gash on his face. “All right, Second. I guess you’ll bring up the rear,” Eddie told him when the rest had gone. To Roger he said, “You needn’t swim, but you must help me swim. Can you?”

  The cadet nodded. The distance between boat and raft was only fifty feet but widening by the second. As Eddie was about to lower himself into the rain-pocked water, Farmingdale seized his shoulders and yanked him backward into the middle of the raft. He was begging incoherently, not in his right mind. Eddie slapped his face hard to bring him around. “You can swim, Second. What’s the matter with you?” he shouted.

  Farmingdale punched Eddie in the jaw, and they began to struggle on their knees, wrestling on the raft’s slick latticework in the driving rain. Eddie felt the raft skidding over waves like a child’s balsa boat. Each time he managed to glimpse the lifeboat, it was farther away. He sensed the anxious gazes of the men on board—Sparks, Wyckoff, the bosun—a skein of connection so alive that it seemed to collapse the distance between them and light the falling dark.

  Eddie managed to work his bowie knife from his pocket, intending to cut Farmingdale’s throat. The second mate wrested the knife from his hand and flung it into the sea. Then he hefted his bulk on top of Eddie, immobilizing him so Eddie saw nothing, felt nothing but the sodden, foul-smelling mass of the larger man pushing him down. Roger roused himself and tried to pull Farmingdale off. When at last the second mate rolled away with a groan, Eddie could hardly see the lifeboat. He began to weep, sobs of rage and frustration at the knowledge that his compatriots were lost to him; that the log of days—his record of incidents and occurrences—was lost, too. He threw back his head and opened his mouth, letting rain wet his throat for several minutes. Then he looked again. He could still see the lifeboat—see, or thought he saw, the men’s eyes fixed upon him. Eddie told himself that the boat was reachable. He could swim that far, even in the confused sea—perhaps even carrying Roger. It was possible. But the very passage of this thought through his mind seemed to awaken the second mate’s nervous attention, his horror of being left behind. Eddie understood then that his only hope was to dive in alone, faster than Farmingdale could catch him. He would have to leave the cadet. No one would question such a move; it was a matter of survival. But his mind veered away. He couldn’t leave Roger to Farmingdale.

  As he strained to see through the dark, Eddie noticed what appeared to be a swimmer. He rubbed his eyes and looked again. No. Yes. A lone head bobbing among the swells like a cork. Bogues? Who else would have the strength and guts to do it? And why? Roger noticed, too, stared and pointed as the shape grew closer. When at last the swimmer reached the raft, Eddie was stunned to see that it was the bosun. He and Roger pulled him aboard. The bosun spent a moment recovering himself and then rose to his feet, som
ehow managing to balance on the pitching raft. He unhooked a lifeboat ax attached to his belt by a lanyard, lifted it over his head, and brought the ax down through Farmingdale’s skull, which cleaved and broke like a dropped plate, spilling brains and blood on the raft’s timbers. The bosun took Farmingdale’s pocketknife from his belt and shoved his body over the side of the raft, where it disappeared into the waves. A swell washed away the pulpy smears.

  All of this transpired in under a minute. Eddie would have thought it a hallucination except for the fact—the immeasurable relief—that Farmingdale was no longer with them on the raft. Within an hour, the rain had stopped and it was entirely dark, the sky clear and moonless. In the distance Eddie saw a smudge of light: the lifeboat’s lantern. The raft hadn’t oars, nor any way to signal to the boat. They had stripped it of everything of value: food, water, compass, anything else that might have helped to keep a man alive.

  It had rained hard and long enough that the water in their clothing was only brackish. They squeezed every drop into each other’s mouths and tried to sleep. Eddie woke often, awaiting first light in hopes of spotting the lifeboat. When dawn came at last, the boat was not in sight. They stared at the empty ocean. Eddie was sick with fright but did his best to behave as if their dire circumstances were merely a setback.

  The bosun touched his throat and shook his head miserably.

  “I know,” Eddie said. “I miss those beautiful sentences.”

  The bosun cocked his head, indicating disbelief.

  “I mean it,” Eddie said. “Now that they’re gone, I want them back.”

  The bosun gestured at himself. “Luke.”

  “No. To me you’re the same bosun you ever were. Isn’t that right, Roger?” But Roger just stared at the sea.

  The bosun opened the rations hold and found the boat cover stuffed inside it; they had been using it for a sun shield the day before. He pulled the broken painter from the water and began working the two together to some purpose.

  “He’s making a sea anchor,” Eddie explained to Roger, trying to engage the cadet. His cheek had swelled grotesquely, shutting his right eye. The wound was deep and red. “We’re better off fixing ourselves to the current,” Eddie went on. “Until there’s a wind in our favor, it’s more likely to bring us to land. Good thinking, Bosun.”

  The bosun cut him with a sharp, familiar glance that roused in Eddie a cavalcade of words: “I know, it’s an outrage that an ignoramus like me should dare to compliment a vastly superior seaman like yourself, Bosun, especially on your thoughts, for God’s sake, but you’re speaking pig latin over there, so I’ve no choice but to try to read your mind—vastly unequal to that task though I surely am.”

  The bosun gawked at him. Even Roger looked up. Never in Eddie’s life had he spoken this way; he felt as if the words were being routed from the bosun’s mind directly through his own throat. He loved the tumbling rush of language coming easily, the unfamiliar pleasure of sheer utterance.

  The bosun grinned for the first time since they’d pulled him from the sea. Eddie had always felt too much the victim of that smile to acknowledge the crescent beauty of its perfect white teeth.

  He used Farmingdale’s knife to begin a new log of days on the raft’s edge. He began at day one, for already their time aboard the lifeboat seemed unreal and full of ghosts. In their new life, the wind was high, the water heavy and black. There was no buffer from the elements—wind, sun, and rain groped and clawed them at will. The stars and moon seemed proximate and unguarded, like bits of shell or sparkling rock that Eddie could crawl among when he chose. They saw night rainbows. By day, Eddie and the bosun scanned the horizon for ships and for their own lost lifeboat. On the second day, two flying fish landed on the raft, which the three of them shared, sucking every fiber of meat from the soft bones, then grinding the bones between their teeth. On the third day, another squall eased their thirst, but they had nothing in which to store the rain.

  Since he’d hit his head on the lifeboat, Roger had grown dim and confused. The eye on the injured side of his face remained shut, and the swelling increased. Eddie tore off a strip of his shirt, soaked it in seawater, and pressed it to the wound. There was nothing more he could do. The gash began to fester, its red aureole spreading over more of Roger’s face. At night he shivered wretchedly, and Eddie and the bosun locked their arms around him from both sides to try to warm him. Each sunset, Eddie made another notch in the edge of the raft: four days; five days. Roger whispered about his Welsh corgi pup; about the eighteen dollars he’d saved from his paper route; about a girl named Annabelle whose breast he’d touched through her Easter sweater. He called for his mother. Eddie pressed his parched lips to the boy’s face and whispered, “We love you, my darling; everything will be fine.” He would do anything to bring the boy peace. He’d witnessed such love for a child somewhere, but he couldn’t recall where or when.

  On the sixth night, Roger lay livid with fever, huffing shallow, frantic breaths. Eddie and the bosun twined their arms around him from both sides. At last the boy let out a long gasp and went still. They held him until all the warmth had left him. When the sun rose, they gently rolled his body into the sea. But Eddie refused to believe he was gone, and kept reaching for him.

  And now he adapted to yet another life in which the lively cadet moved among the legion of ghosts he couldn’t reach. Scorching sun, frigid nights, the press of their grating, unconquerable hunger. Eddie felt his body devouring itself, an agony like gnawing teeth. They lay prone upon the raft, too weak to look for food or ships, occasional brief squalls relieving their thirst. Eddie was skeletal and frail; he couldn’t remember the last time he’d urinated. He was a corpse, little more, yet even as his body failed, his thoughts whirled with elastic new freedom. Eddie understood what he’d seen in the opium dens of Shanghai: people draped and torpid, but their minds must have ranged as his did now, careening through clouds of sound and color like a spirit unleashed.

  The bosun’s visible shrinking mirrored Eddie’s own, their wild hair and beards a mockery of their withdrawing flesh. The bosun was less afflicted by the sun, which lacerated Eddie’s skin through his tattered garments. His only relief came from floating in the sea. At least once between sunrise and sunset, he shook off his paralysis enough to lower himself into the water, clinging to the sea anchor line. Only at these times did Eddie escape the assault of gravity, which leaned on his frail bones like a heel grinding him onto pavement. The pleasure of floating, of being submerged, was worth even the stinging aftermath of salt drying in his sores. The bosun helped to pull him back onto the raft; Eddie hadn’t the strength. They never spoke. For long spells they lay side by side, gazing into each other’s eyes. Eddie regretted having missed the chance to ask his friend about Lagos and why he’d gone to sea, whether he was Catholic, his best memories and worst. It was too late for stories. They had left language behind, even the root language of the sea.

  Once, as they lay on the raft in daylight, Eddie became aware of a gentle weight beside them. He opened his eyes and saw an albatross, white and awkward, her massive wings folded at her sides like artists’ easels. The bosun was asleep. Using some vestige of strength, Eddie slashed at the bird with the pocketknife, trying to slice her head from the neck. The albatross dodged him easily, rising a foot or so in the air and settling back down. She cocked her head, watching him curiously with her bright black eyes.

  The next day Eddie lay shivering although the sun was hot. The bosun held and tried to warm him. “Good man,” he said, and Eddie recognized a version of his own endearments to the dying cadet so very long ago. He wanted to object, to correct the bosun with a range of facts that faded into colors before he could force them into language. Eddie hardly moved, hardly breathed, conserving the last of his energy, slowing things down nearly to the point of death in order to live another hour. He would die to stay alive, to savor the sensuous gallop of his thoughts toward some truth he hadn’t yet perceived. He no longer knew if it was d
ay or night, whether he was alone or with the bosun. He recalled his younger daughter—her mind locked inside a body condemned to stillness. His discovery of their likeness pierced Eddie with such intensity that he cried out, although no sound came. Mashed against the raft, longing to float, he remembered Lydia in her bath, her relief and laughter at the pleasure of lying suspended in the warm water. But Eddie had turned away, appalled by her misshapenness. And for the first time, the only time, the crime of his abandonment assailed Eddie, and he cried out, “Lydia! Liddy!,” his harsh choked voice shocking him as he groped for the child he had abandoned—the family he had abandoned.

  Eddie lay stricken, Lydia’s name like a coin in his mouth. Then a light, wafting sound filled his ears, a voice he dimly remembered—not Anna’s, certainly not the bosun’s, but one that spoke in a bubbling, giddy rush, a lolloping prattle like the chattering cheerful nonsense of birdsong. Eddie broke away from the body on the raft and followed this sound to its source as if it were music drifting from an open window. He stopped to listen, straining to catch hold of the chuckling babble like two hands clapping to capture a bright ribbon snapping in the wind. He was following Lydia, and she was breathless, she was laughing, her words coming not in sentences so much as waves, a language he’d once discounted but now, at last, could understand, Papa Anna run Mama see the sea Mama clap Anna see the sea Papa kiss Anna run to see the sea the see the sea the sea the sea theseatheseatheseatheseatheseathesea, the words becoming a monotone, a simple back-and-forth, the plucking of a string, the beating of a heart: his heart, her heart, one heart. Here it was, the truth that underlay all the rest, like stirrings from the bottom of the sea. And only now did Eddie feel the bosun’s arms still around him—he’d been there all the while, had never left. “Coming soon,” the bosun said. “Coming soon, my friend. Almost done. God is with us yet.”