Not utterly out of breath, I thought at the docks, smoothing back my hair, trying again to calm myself. For I had seen earlier that evening a man who was, being dead, utterly out of breath: one Alfons Kuylers. No, the problem, I realized, was—as Alfons Kuylers had said in so many of our philosophical sessions together—the opposite and the inverse, not that I was too out of breath, but that I was, as it were, too alive, living too many lives at once, as if I were breathing for many men. In retrospect, this realization seems far from cogent, simply another layer of ontological mystification, but at the time it seemed akin to revelation.
It was in such a state, slightly feverish perhaps from the rain or from the fatal events that had transpired earlier, that I began my search. At this hour most vessels were inaccessible, gangplanks raised, ramps blocked off. I moved from ship to ship, trying to find one that would grant me a berth. I hailed several from the docks without receiving a reply. The one reply I did finally have suggested that surely nothing was to be done in the dead of night, particularly considering the unrest in the city: I should return in the morning.
But morning, I feared, would be too late for me. I persisted, moving slowly from ship to ship, crying out, trying my luck with vessels large and small, albeit with little hope. It would be better, I counseled myself, to turn yourself in, for your crime was pointless and worthy only of regret. And yet I kept on, calling out, asking for passage, proclaiming that, though a scholar rather than a sailor, I was eager and willing to learn.
Near the end of the wharf, I came upon a small freighter, manged with rust, older than the other vessels, but seaworthy nonetheless. A light on its deck shone uncomfortably into my eyes. I thought this light at first to be stationary, until it swung slowly away and I saw it held by a human hand.
“Who is it?” a voice asked.
I explained again my plight. I said I asked for no favors, only the privilege of working for my passage. I was, I said, willing to learn.
“Do you not care where we are bound?”
It was, I claimed, a matter of complete indifference to me. I wanted only to leave. I cited the unrest in the city, and wanderlust, saying nothing to hint at the fatal events that had taken place earlier.
“Shall we have your name then?” the sailor asked.
“My name?” I said, and, not caring to give myself away, said, “My name is Alfons Kuylers.”
“Ah,” the sailor said. “We’ve been expecting you, Kuylers. Come aboard.”
I should have gathered something from this odd reply and indeed might have, had I not been so rattled, and so pleased to have gained a berth. At the time, I simply forced the words from my mind—or rather pushed them below the surface, where they would remain in the murk, before slowly, like a corpse, rising again. Later, when I was unable to dismiss the sailor’s words so easily, I turned them over and over in my head. I had misheard, I told myself, my guilt substituting an impossibility for what had actually been said. When this ceased to satisfy, I began to think that perhaps Kuylers had meant to depart with me, that he had in fact forewarned the captain of the freighter of our joint arrival. This made me fear that I had killed my mentor for no reason.
But in the instant, such thoughts had been quickly pressed down unexamined and had long to wait before bloating and slowly surfacing again. For the moment, I simply placed one foot before the other, ascended the gangplank, and came aboard. When, on deck, I approached the lantern, looking for the sailor who had hailed me, I found that he had hung his lantern on the loop of a guideline and had disappeared. Thus when I moved toward what I thought to be him, I found no one at all.
Almost immediately, the vessel started to sway and move. I had seen no other figures on the deck, but perhaps they had been there all along, near their posts, veiled in darkness, only awaiting the arrival of one Alfons Kuylers. I caught myself on the rail and steadied myself, and then, as an afterthought, turned and looked back at the city. I was not sorry to see it go. I thought how, had I not been forewarned by Alfons Kuylers, the city might well have become my grave.
And it was in that moment, thinking of my mentor with a certain melancholy fondness but with something akin to hysteria and hatred bubbling just beneath, that I thought I saw, on the pier, motionless, a figure possessed of the same stooped posture as Kuylers. He stood there, unmoving. I watched him, and was unable to look away, until he faded into the darkness and, along with the pier he stood upon, was lost.
I felt my way forward until my fingers found the wall of the deckhouse, and then I followed the wall of the deckhouse to a small stooped entrance, which I passed through, and then found myself on a narrow set of stairs that I descended into darkness. I felt my way down a dark passage and came finally, after three locked doors, to a fourth door, which was cracked open slightly, a faint glow seeping through the crack. I pushed my way in, found myself in a narrow cabin, two berths on either side, one above the other. In between, a candle glimmered on a cask that had been turned on one end to serve as a makeshift table.
I had begun to crawl into a berth before realizing it contained another man, his skin, which I touched in my fumbling, oddly chill.
“Kuylers?” he asked.
I assented.
“Your berth is above,” he said. “But blow out the candle first.”
I apologized and, after blowing out the candle, clambered up and into the upper berth. The room was still a shade away from sheer darkness, lit now by the lesser dark of the night shining through the porthole. My eyes, already accustomed to the dim candle, quickly adjusted.
Even so, only once I’d been there for some time did I start to realize that the sailor below me was not the only other man in the room, that the other bunks were occupied as well. Why I had not seen this before in the light of the candle, I couldn’t say, but I saw the men now—first the faint gleam of their eyes, turned as I could tell toward me, and then, after more time, just a slight variance from the shadow of the berth itself, the hint of their large bodies.
“Hello,” I said.
There were vague rumblings in reply, the gleams of the eyes shifting or disappearing.
“My name is Kuylers,” I said. “Can you tell me yours?” I asked.
One of the men chuckled, but none offered their names.
“What is the name of this ship?” I persisted. “And what is our cargo?”
At this they all laughed. “Ah, Kuylers,” one of the men said, “go to sleep.”
Such responses being curious enough, I was reluctant to inquire further. I lay in the bunk wondering what I had got myself into, but exhaustion quickly caught up with me. Before I knew it, I was asleep.
•
I was awoken by sunlight streaming through the porthole. My companions, I saw, were already up and departed, bunks neatly made. I clambered down and arranged my own bunk as well, then made my way slowly out and onto the deck, the clean, cold salt air sharp in my lungs. I looked around for my cabinmates, but the deck itself seemed deserted, the deckhouse as well, and the ship itself stood still, as if becalmed. I made my way from stem to stern and back again, but found nobody there.
Once belowdecks, I found my own cabin just as I had left it, the three doors I had previously examined still locked. Following the passage back farther, I found it to lead past two other doors, also locked. An iron stairwell descended to the hold and to the engine room, both of which seemed deserted. I went on deck and found another stairway, at the bottom of which was another series of locked doors. The final door at the passage’s end, according to a bronze plaque, was the captain’s cabin. I opened this and found it deserted as well, bunk neatly made.
Not knowing what else to do, I knocked on each of the locked doors in turn, but had no reply. Uncertain of what to think of this, I spent the day wandering the vessel, examining it, doing what I could to occupy myself. In the captain’s cabin I found several books, including one on knots and their uses, and I spent the last part of my day trying to replicate the knots therein described,
growing hungrier all the time.
I searched the ship for food, but could find nothing. Perhaps the galley was behind one of the locked doors where the crew, for reasons that were beyond me, had chosen to sequester themselves away from me.
It was like that throughout the day, the vessel motionless, becalmed, my hunger growing. In the captain’s cabin I found a hook and a coil of fishing line, but there was nothing with which to bait the hook. Still, I let the hook dangle over the side in hopes of catching something, coiling it in from time to time and regarding the empty, dripping curve of metal at its end before paying it out again.
Near evening, leaning over the side, a twist of fishing line around one wrist, I thought I saw something at a little distance. At first I took it for another vessel, but as it drew closer it seemed too small to be a boat. As it came closer still, it proved too animate to be anything not alive. I squinted against the fading light, becoming more and more convinced that the figure in the water was human.
Where had the fellow appeared from? How long had he been swimming? It was growing too dark to see clearly. I looked about for a line that I could cast to him, but he was still too far away for that. Perhaps, I thought, he would make it to the ladder on his own. But he was swimming awkwardly now, as if on the verge of exhaustion, as if ready to go under.
And then suddenly with a lurch the ship began to move, slowly at first and then with increasing speed. I watched the swimming man stop mid-stroke, staring after us, and then he sank below the waves and was gone.
I rushed about the ship, crying out until I found the captain again, standing just where he had stood before, on the night I had first met him, holding the same lantern.
“Ah, Kuylers,” he said. “Relishing the journey so far?”
I explained, shielding my eyes from the glare of the lantern, what I had seen, the man swimming, making doggedly for us, then stopping and sinking beneath the waves.
“A shame,” said the captain.
“But we must go back,” I said.
The captain shook his head. “If he is to catch up with us, he’ll catch up with us tomorrow. If not, it’s not meant to be.”
“He won’t be alive tomorrow,” I said.
“He’ll travel all the faster then,” said the captain. “Besides, who’s to go, Kuylers? We have a full ship: who is to go?”
I told him he was callous. There was room aboard, I said, plenty of it. What kind of men have I thrown my lot in with? I wondered aloud. He just laughed, turned away.
I spent my early evening wandering the deck, finding as I could crew members who, busy though they were with their various tasks, deigned to listen to me as they worked. It was a matter of a human life, I told them, we must go back. Most listened in silence. They paused just a moment as I concluded and then shook their heads and went on with their tasks. One asked me, in a soft, whispering voice, what the captain himself had had to say about it, and when I explained what the captain had said, the fellow nodded and declared the captain to be quite right.
“But what does he mean, ‘Who’s to go?’” I asked. “Surely we can take a man as far as the next port.”
The man shook his head. “The captain’s right,” he said, and would say no more.
•
Soon my hunger, forgotten in the excitement due the swimmer, returned and I made another circuit of the deck, inquiring of my shipmates when I might expect a meal. They ogled me as if I were mad, and refused to respond. As I backed away from them, I found them whispering among themselves, their heads inclined toward one another against the lesser dark of the night sky. There was something wrong, I started to feel, with my having posed this question, some breach of etiquette, as if I had crossed a boundary of taste without knowing. I was not a sailor; perhaps there was something I should know but did not. And yet, could they not make allowances for my ignorance and let me know both how I had mistepped and also what I must do to be fed?
I withdrew, then sat alone up near the prow, watching the waves. I stayed there staring out into the darkness, the breeze chill against my flesh, trying to ignore the way my stomach pounded like an unbattened shutter in the wind. It had been a mistake, I told myself, to leave the city as precipitously as I had, a mistake, too, to kill Kuylers. All of it a mistake. And yet here I was, I reminded myself. I must make the best of it.
In the end, after hours of waiting, my stomach convinced me. Surely it could not hurt, it told me, to speak with the captain about food. He at the very least had to acknowledge me. If I were in fact breaking etiquette, I had breached it already, and the captain, who knew something of my circumstances coming aboard, of my lack of experience at sea, might at least prove sympathetic.
The captain was to be found where I had seen him before, lantern still in his hand.
“Yes?” he said gruffly. “What is it now?”
It was only, I said, that I had perhaps somehow missed the bells that called the crew to meals. Surely my fault but, you see, I hadn’t had anything to eat since boarding the ship last night, and little, to be honest, to eat the day prior. If it wasn’t too much trouble, a few scraps, just something to line my stomach with, the smallest thing—
“What?” he asked, as if amazed. “You want to eat?”
Well, yes, I said, just a few scraps …
He swung the lantern toward me. “Are you really who you claim to be?” he asked. “Are you Alfons Kuylers?”
“What does my being Kuylers have to do with it?” I asked. But when he kept regarding me without responding, I saw no choice but to repeat my lie. Yes, I claimed, I was Alfons Kuylers, hadn’t I told him as much from the first?
With this, his brow relaxed slightly and he turned away, mumbling that perhaps there was still something in the hold, that I should help myself to anything I could find.
And indeed, after a good moment of scrabbling through the hold, I found, at the bottom of an overturned barrel, some old hardtack and, in a bottle rolling loose among the debris, a good measure of third-rate whiskey. It will be enough, I told myself, soaking the hardtack in whiskey so as to choke it down. It will keep me until morning, when I can find out more about regular meals and learn where to get water.
Yet in the morning I awoke alone again in my bunk, the ship no longer moving, the bunks around me neatly made as if never having been slept in. I made my own bunk in the same fashion, then made my way up abovedecks. I could see no anchor dropped and yet the ship remained as motionless as if it were encased in stone. The deck, too, as on the day before, was deserted, the deckhouse as well, and my investigations of the spaces belowdecks led to the same locked doors, the same absence of personnel. I pounded on these locked doors and demanded admittance, without response.
My throat, deprived of water for a day and a half now, was parched and dry. After much searching, I found in the corner of the hold, strewn with garbage, a few mouthfuls of brackish water that at first I gathered in my palm, and then, once it was nearly gone, I crouched to lap the rest up like a dog.
In the captain’s cabin, in a small lacquered chest, I found a short crowbar, alongside a loaded pistol. I took both. The crowbar I used on one of the locked doors, knocking first and, when there was no response, slowly prying the lock out of the frame. Behind it was the galley, but the room itself was empty, no foodstuffs or staples of any kind. I managed to undo the pipe under the sink and drank the fusty water that had gathered in its angle. But there was nothing to eat.
I went from locked door to locked door, bellowing, and then, when I received no response, forcing my way in with the crowbar. I had, I realized, crossed over some sort of line that I was not likely to be able to cross back over again. With the opening of each new door and the revelation of yet another room, I felt a little more unhinged myself, a little madder, the lack of food, too, acting oddly upon me so that I felt as though my skin were being eaten by insects. What were they playing at? I wanted to know, increasingly furious, Why would they hide from me? When I found them, I told myself,
I would hold a pistol to the captain’s head and demand he tell me what was going on.
But what was I to do when, cracking open the last door, the door behind which the captain and crew by default had to be gathered, I found the room as impossibly empty as all the rest?
My memories of the next few hours are tenuous at best. I recall a kind of vague stumbling belowdecks, panic alternating with fury. I entered each room again to assure myself my shipmates were not there, then entered yet again. I held the pistol to my temple and tried to persuade myself to pull the trigger, but could not. With the crowbar, I broke what I could in the captain’s cabin and then remained there among the wreckage, listless. At some point I lost the gun, abandoned it somewhere belowdecks, and when I ran out of things to break, I let the crowbar trail from one hand and scrape along the floor until that too slipped from my fingers and was gone.
In the end, unwilling and unable to understand where they might have gone, I made my slow way up onto the deck. It was late afternoon, almost evening, the sun starting to blister the horizon. The deck was unoccupied. It was impossible, they were nowhere; it was impossible. I must leave the ship, I couldn’t help thinking, and once I’d thought it, the idea became intense and urgent, unavoidable. I must leave the ship, my mind kept telling me, I must leave the ship, and I might well have thrown myself overboard—for indeed I moved aft to do just that—had I not seen as I mounted the rail, at a little distance, a figure, human, swimming, slowly drawing closer to the boat.
Fugue State Page 18