They had all but stopped making love in the City.
The seashore was their fountain of youth.
* * *
“How’s your Shakespeare these days?’ she said.
“What?”
“Your Shakespeare. Put your puzzle down again.”
“Okay.”
“’If it be a sin to covet honor, I am the most offending soul alive.’”
“That’s Henry something.”
“That’s right. The Fifth. The St. Crispin’s Day speech. Very good. Now listen to me. I not only love you, I honor you. Are you listening? Yes? Good. And you honor me, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then don’t argue, dammit. The cats can stay with my sister. She adores them.”
* * *
The shivering came in waves, and it was violent, as though he were trying to shake himself apart, and not what Ryan knew he was really doing, generating heat. But the pauses between episodes of shivering got longer and longer as they undressed, dried him down, and then wrapped him in the polypropylene, woolen blankets, and the space blankets, applied the chemical heat packs to his neck, his armpits, his groin, and the palms of his hands, yet finally, despite all that, the shivering had stopped altogether, and now Ryan was worried as hell. Because now there was no radial pulse, and only the faintest in the carotid. And that looked to be winding down as well.
They hoisted the stretcher into the rear. They were doing it by the book, but the man was slipping. His temperature was down to 86 degrees, and he was damn slow about getting it up any further.
He was looking at a guy whose body had passed through hibernation into a state of metabolic icebox here. Blue skin, muscles rigid, pupils fixed, and no discernable breathing. He looked dead. He acted dead. But Ryan knew he wasn’t dead and wouldn’t be for a while at least. They played possum on you. The rule of thumb with victims of hypothermia was that there was no such thing as cold and dead. Only warm and dead.
He shut the doors behind them. The heating unit was already blasting.
His partner Knowles had the warm dextrose drip into him, and they were feeding him warm moist oxygen. Outer temperature was important against further heat loss, but not nearly as important as internal. They had to stabilize and try to raise his core temp as soon as possible, or they were looking at potential damage to the heart, lungs or brain. Or all three put together.
“CPR?” said Knowles.
“No way. He’s still got a pulse. We stay with that for now. At this point his heart’s hyperexcitable as hell. We do CPR, and he’s still pulsing we risk arrhythmia. We could kill the poor bastard.”
“Okay. What then?”
He heard an engine rev, glanced out the double doors, and saw their sister EV pull away awkwardly across the sand.
“Relieve him. That’s what we do,” he said. “I want to express his urine. He’s got a bladder big as a football from cold diuresis, and he’s using up heat to keep that warm instead of the rest of him. There are times our bodies aren’t too swift about priorities.”
“We ready to roll yet, gentlemen?” said Andrews from the front seat. Andrews was young and way too impatient for his own good, but he was a damn good driver.
“One second,” Ryan said. “Knowles, grab me a Foley twelve. Our guy’s gotta see a man about a horse.”
He held out his hand for the catheter.
* * *
The first thing he learned about even the possibility of being seriously ill was how lonely it was. It was lonely to its very core. People could be concerned, kind, encouraging, and even loving but illness was a thing you did all on your own—something no outside hand could touch. Certainly not the doctors. The doctors were there simply in the capacity of benign detectives. Well, hopefully benign at least. To them you were a sort of crossword puzzle to be either solved, or abandoned as impossible to solve whatever the case may be. Later they might rise to the level of trusted advisors. Still later, once you damn well knew you were sick, angels, demons, or secular gods.
Yet even in their hands as they poked and prodded you were alone, cast deep inside yourself. Aware finally that the flesh which had once sustained you beyond any question or second of doubt was now unexpectedly falling prey to time and dissolution. That your flesh had now turned undependable—and in Ben’s case, since it was prostate cancer and metastasizing like crazy—that it had turned into the enemy, was hard to explain even to yourself. Incomprehensible to anyone else.
It was your flesh, and thus your personal enemy, and yours alone. The word alone had never held such clarity and weight.
A caress could comfort. Sure. But it couldn’t pay the troops enough to convince them to continue the battle. The troops were tired. The troops were all in mutiny.
Ruth had tried of course.
She suffered too—from osteoporosis. And osteoporosis was pain in spades god knows and a betrayal all its own, but people lived for years with it. It wasn’t a hangman’s noose waiting in the yard.
“Remember?”
Her single counterinsurgency weapon was their past, and she wielded it tenderly and with grace.
Remember? The antique store in England where they bought the cedar chest. The owner right out of Dickens. The climb to the shrine at Delos where the wind took her wide-brim hat and sailed it out to sea. Setting up his first painters’ studio in Portland, and not a job coming in for months, Ben painting angry frustrated abstracts until finally Bantam came through with the fantasy series. He should have stayed with the abstracts, she said, which were selling in the high five figures. Their first kitten, Agamemnon, who had hidden sulking under the bed for a week like Achilles in his tent, and then suddenly for no observable reason, decided that he was master of all he surveyed. High tea with Liz and Josie at the Plaza. Christmas dinner with Neil and Donald on Mount Desert Island. On and on.
Her version of events was not always as he remembered them, but he supposed that was to be expected.
And that was the second thing he learned about being seriously ill.
What a strange and special repository he was.
How much sheer history you had inside you that was going to die when you did.
He realized with a kind of growing awe that his own version of events would simply disappear shortly as though it had never existed. What would be left would be Ruth’s version, friends’ or relatives’ versions, or his publishers’ versions. His own point of view, that which was uniquely Ben Sebald’s, would pass utterly from the world’s vocabulary. And his secrets—guilty personal failings, which he had tried to keep hidden from everyone all these years, even from Ruth—would ironically become irrelevant. As perhaps they always were anyway.
He told her what he wanted to do.
“What about Greece?” she said. “You always loved Greece.”
“Not Greece this time.”
“I’m going with you.”
“I don’t think so. What’s a five-letter word for mooed?”
* * *
Charlie Harmon was on lunch break in the cafeteria, and his luck was bad again. Sorenson sat down unwelcome as always with his tray directly across from him, and the tuna salad on his plate was about the same color and seemingly the same texture as Sorenson’s teeth. His brilliant hospital whites only enhanced the illusion. Charlie’s appetite was rapidly swimming downstream.
“True story,” Sorenson said. “We had three drunks in here from Wildwood one night couple years ago. Tail-end of a very liquid wedding party. I mean, they’re loaded as hell. So they decide to jump off the pier together. Made a pact. Said they’d had it—enough’s enough, right? Life sucks. Maybe they couldn’t get laid that night, who the fuck knows. But see, one of them’s wearing this really expensive cashmere coat, and he takes it off and puts it down on the rocks, and on their way off the pier arm in arm one of the other drunks steps on it. The guy with the coat says, you fucking piece of shit! Why’d you step on my coat? Why the fuck would I want to go out with an inconsiderate piec
e of shit like you? And he starts swinging. The third guy, their buddy, he gets between the two of them, and before you know it all three of these guys are in the drink, and not one of them can fucking swim. They were lucky the groom came down for a smoke. His wife didn’t care for cigarettes.”
Charlie looked at him.
“So your point is?”
Sorenson shrugged. “No point, Charlie. Just how fucked up is this business anyway though, huh? Just how fucked up is it?”
“Jesus” Harmon said. “Eat your lunch.”
* * *
He held her as he always had when they were young. His arms still strong around her back as he kissed her, and then shifted his weight suddenly and toppled them off the jetty into the blaze of freezing water—black granite and weathered lichen-covered concrete already well beyond their grasp in just an instant’s time should they even have thought to reach for it again as the swells moved them back and forth to sea. She gasped at the sudden blinding cold and clutched his waist.
The tide went wild only once and threw him back amid spray and foam into one of the huge granite blocks beneath the surface, bruising his hip just below where the ropes bound the two of them together, and then sent them floating free.
They went down and then up again, and he could feel them shivering almost in a kind of unison, and her eyes were wide blinking away the water, and her face had taken on an unlikely pallor. I love you he shouted, and she began to say the same I love...when they were drawn down beneath a wave. When they rose again, he shook his head and realized in that movement of his neck how much his muscles were already stiffening. This soon, he thought. Good. His throat felt rubbed with salt. The membranes in his nostrils burned.
His eyes burned too, but he could still blink the sting away and look at her. At some version of her anyhow, one he had never quite seen before whose lips and eyelids were stained a delicate blue. With a shock, he saw that she was smiling. Or perhaps the muscles of her face were contracting into what appeared to be a smile—perhaps it was a swindle of a smile. But he didn’t think so. He thought that it was real. He felt light-headed, almost drunk himself. He pulled her closer until he couldn’t feel his hands anymore, and then his arms around her, and when finally the sea drew him down to darkness he wasn’t sure exactly who was there with him at all.
* * *
When Ryan, Knowles, and Andrews responded to the call and pulled up beside the old man on the beach, he still had the rope lashed around his waist, but the other end had come free so that their sister unit found the woman several yards away, lying face-down just above the tideline with her head half buried in the hard wet sand. The two kids who’d found them couldn’t have been more than ten years old, but that didn’t stop one of them from having a cell phone. Times like this you could almost like the goddamn things. It had maybe saved the guy.
From what Ryan could tell the woman wasn’t likely to make it.
She had eaten a lot of sand.
* * *
He woke and saw where he’d been swimming to, and that he was alone.
He gasped and screamed.
* * *
“You’re a fool,” she said quieting him. “I love you, but you’re a very foolish man, you know that? I know you. What you’ll do is, you’ll wait a few months. And you’ll just agonize all that time. All that awful time. With the cancer, and about me too. When you don’t have to. You can come right now. Just as we’d planned. You just start swimming again. You know the tides.”
* * *
“Aw, goddammit!” said Charlie Harmon. “Shit!” He reached for the paddles and thrust them at her. “Goddammit!”
“Hush,” said Denise. “Charlie, look at his face. Look at him. You see that?”
He looked down at the man and then at her.
Her dark green eyes were pooled and still.
“Hush, Charlie” she said. “Shhhhhhh.”
CORBETT’S CAGE
Shawn P. Madison
John Corbett gasped for air as the tremendous wave washed over him. His cage slammed against the metal plating of the great ship as he hurtled against the cold, wet bars. His left ankle still bled even though the bastards nearly severed it about an hour ago. The sea heaved to and fro, and continued to smash into his cage, more often than not submerging the iron box for several seconds.
This blasted night couldn’t become any worse, couldn’t grow more insane, could it? The storm raged wildly, tossing the huge pirate vessel as if it were so much driftwood. With each grand swell of the dark waves, his cage would once again slam into the side of the ship, rattling his teeth, and sending him crashing against the bars. He was sure of a concussion, and the dizziness became harder to shake off.
“Damn you bastards!” He roared into the night and quickly gulped in air as another monstrous wave washed over his cage.
He emerged once again gasping and spitting out the fetid seawater. Five others of his crew hung in identical cages along the starboard side of the ship, just high enough to avoid total submersion, but low enough to keep them in water. He bet his life that six more of his crewmates suffered similar fates on the ship’s portside.
“Why?!” he demanded of no one but himself, not willing to waste any more energy on the effort of screaming. Thirty-six of the original sixty-seven man crew of the cargo ship Hargitay had been murdered outright once the filthy band of pirates gained control, including the captain. The cutthroats made the remaining twelve men watch in shackles as they stripped the bodies of their thirty-six fellow seamen, methodically cut them up into ragged little grisly pieces, and piled them into a bloody corner of the deck. Only the heads remained whole. Nineteen other crewmen were also killed in the brief but bloody battle for control of the Hargitay.
The pirates came upon them seemingly out of nowhere. The strange night sky was a melee of half-raging storm clouds, crackling thunder, and half-hazy full-moon. Before the Hargitay’s crew knew what happened, their sails blazed, and pirates had boarded their ship.
Strangely enough, the Hargitay’s cargo remained in the holds as the pirates sank the once proud ship. The pirates removed the crew, most of them carved up, then brought out the cages, thick iron bars on all four sides, and on top with a single iron plate for the floor.
Corbett, the Hargitay’s former second-in-command, went kicking and screaming into his. Before going in, he noticed a sliding partition in the single-plate floor with a crank underneath for opening.
He had tried for the better part of an hour to reach for that crank, stretching with all his might through the unyielding bars of the flailing cage, but nearly broke an arm due to the harsh and unforgiving seas.
With the moon for his only light, his and five other cages were hauled over the side with enormous geared winches. Corbett closed his eyes against the ghastly horror of these memories, and another wall of water slammed his cage against the ship’s metal side. The cacophony of the incessant waves, mixed with the constant metallic clanking of multiple cages striking against the dull iron plates that lined the pirate ship, sheared through his brain like a spike, his mind caught in a whirlwind of confusion and pain.
In the hazy moonlight streaming in from one half of the sky, he watched in terror as the gory bits of his fallen comrades fell into the sea like so much bait. He couldn’t shake the dreadful vision of Captain Charles Derry’s head as it hit the ocean mere feet from the bottom of his cage, bobbing twice before vanishing beneath the murky waves. Derry’s lifeless eyes seemed to look straight through to his very soul as they vanished into the ocean depths.
The rain slashed sideways, pelting his naked body. Soaked and shivering, Corbett worried only slightly about confinement in a metal cage amidst such a horrendous lightning storm. He dreaded something else much more—his impending death.
Just as another wave slammed his cage, a blood-curdling scream rang out in the night, loud enough to break through the crashing waves and booming thunder. Several screams followed, some of his own included, but that last
one sounded like the slaughter of another of his crewmates.
His ankle still oozed, though much less now than before, creating a bloody trail across the iron plate floor, through the bars and into the ocean. The slightly scabbed and ragged slash at his ankle-joint was half-clotted with blood. The briny seawater caused the wound little pain compared to hat his body suffered as it jostled around the cage with each and every pounding wave.
He’d noticed, while still in shackles on the deck, that the twelve men spared from the cages were the largest men aboard the Hargitay. Was that to make the cage a more snug fit? Or just to show them that even their twelve largest men were no match for these pirates?
Though the pirate band uttered few words, except for the war cries and battle-whoops during their initial siege, he overheard two of the filthy maggots say that the twelve Hargitay crewmen ought to be enough food to give them safe passage through the night and into morning.
Were they to be eaten, then? Were these pirates cannibals? If so, why put us in cages and suspend us over the side? Questions and more questions, but no answers came, as more water filled the cage, and Corbett’s teeth rattled once more upon impacting against the iron plates.
He strained to look toward the next cage in line hanging over the side of the immense ship. He swept a soaked hand across his eyes several times to try and clear away the onslaught of salty water, but the driving rain filled in wherever the ocean failed to reach.
An enormous ship, easily one of the largest vessels Corbett recalled ever seeing. Its sides seemed encased in smooth iron-armor plating. The flags, which rode high on the wind earlier in the night, were of many colors, but bore no resemblance to any he recognized.
Daggett McConnell was inside the next cage down. Corbett tried calling out to him, but it was no use, the raging seas drowned out his voice.
McConnell wasn’t moving much anymore. In fact, the man hadn’t moved at all for quite some time, except for his body’s jostling with the slamming waves.
Better off for him, Corbett thought and railed against his bars with no effect. Another wave and Corbett held his breath as he braced for the impact. Once the water cleared the cage, he shook his head and tried to peer upward against the slashing rain. He could see their faces, looking down over the side, suddenly watching. The last time he glanced up no one occupied the deck, but now there seemed hundreds.
Fearful Fathoms: Collected Tales of Aquatic Terror (Vol. I - Seas & Oceans) Page 50