The Best American Short Stories 2017

by Meg Wolitzer

  I detailed for her my impressions of my first submarine, the Seahorse, and the way I’d almost fallen overboard when hurrying across the narrow plank onto its saddle tanks while the chief petty officer watched from the bridge, expressing his displeasure at my insufficient pace. How intimidating I’d found its insides, its lower half packed with trimming tanks, fuel tanks, oil tanks, electric batteries, and so on, and its upper all valves and switches and wiring and cables and pressure gauges and junction boxes, and how I’d had to learn from painful experience which valve was likely to crack me on the head over which station, and the revelation that above the cramped wooden bunks were cupboards and curtains. I described how the conning tower became a wind tunnel when we surfaced and the diesels were sucking in air, and how the diesels themselves were a pandemonium of noise in such confined space. I described a rare look through the periscope, as I glimpsed far more clearly than I’d expected a flurry of tumbling green sea that blurred the eyepiece like heavy rain on a windscreen and then swept past.

  There was much I chose to spare her. On our first sea trial the piston rings wore away and exhaust flooded the engine room and everyone had to work gas-masked at their stations, sweating and panting and ready to faint. On our second, one of our own destroyers tried to ram us and then, after we’d identified ourselves, reported that it had pursued without success two German U-boats. On our practice emergency dives everyone threw themselves down the conning tower ladder, trampling each other’s fingers, and not even shouted orders could be heard above the awful Klaxon. On training maneuvers we lost the torpedo-loading competition, the navigation competition, the crash-dive competition, and the Lewis gun competition. On our second practice torpedo attack everything went according to plan, and when I reported accordingly to our torpedo officer he said, “Are you hoping for a prize?”

  With nowhere to go we are headed vaguely toward the Andaman Sea off the west coast of Indochina, diving by day and gasping in relief in the cooler surface air at night. Every few days the captain announces our itinerary. He long ago resolved whenever possible to keep the crew informed, since it is his belief that we have a right to know what we are doing and why, and as security is hardly an issue aboard a submarine.

  It is impossible to verify whether the wireless silence has to do more with our forces’ standing orders not to give away our positions to the enemy’s direction finders, or with the total unraveling of our efforts in the region. The captain finally patched through to HQ Eastern Fleet and was told to stand by and then nothing more. A week later a Dutch merchant ship we raised on the horizon reported its understanding that the Eastern Fleet had abandoned even Ceylon, and fallen all the way back to Kenya. That, the captain announced, for the time being left the decision to us whether to quit the field or to strike a blow with what we had. He was choosing the latter.

  The crew is divided about his verdict. On the one hand, as our torpedo officer advised us, at such a dark time perhaps even an isolated victory could do something to buoy morale. It took only one U-boat to sink the Royal Oak in Scapa Flow. On the other hand, alone and unsupported, if we were to attack a fleet of any size at all our chances of escape would be infinitesimal. Run into the right ship, he said, and we could find ourselves in all the papers. Run into the wrong one, Mills replied, and we could find ourselves with seaweed growing out of our ears.

  The captain has elected to ignore the few enemy merchant vessels we spy, in order to hoard our likely irreplaceable torpedoes for capital ships. When we’re surfaced and the circumstances seem safe he has the wireless operators continue to request information. Upon crossing the tenth parallel he announced over the voice-pipe that as far as he knew the entirety of the Royal Navy’s fighting strength had now fled the Indian Ocean for the Bay of Bengal.

  Despite the limitation of shifts to four hours, with everyone so cramped and hot and miserable it’s an ongoing effort of will to recall what we are supposed to be doing or monitoring every waking second of such a long patrol. Even in the head a lapse in focus can have calamitous results, as any mucking up of the sequence of valve operations to empty the lavatory pan will cause its contents to be pressure-sprayed into the inattentive crewman’s face.

  Because of the chaos in Ceylon we were revictualed with one type of tinned food only: a peculiar soaplike mutton that’s been breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the past three weeks. Those who complain are reminded that it all tastes of diesel oil, anyway. We have weevils in our biscuits, as if we’re serving under Nelson at Trafalgar.

  A bearing seized in one of the engines and the engineers spent three days disconnecting and slinging the piston; the resulting vibration was so severe our conning tower lookouts couldn’t see through their binoculars. Now with that addressed we wait for a ship large enough to engage, and those who complain about the uncanny solitude are reminded what the alternative will mean.

  In our berths Mills suggests it’s a miracle we’ve made it this far. He came aboard sufficiently early in our Norway patrols to wish that he hadn’t, and he often compares the two theaters for their relative miseries: off Norway we couldn’t cook on the surface because it was too rough, whereas here it’s impossible when submerged due to the heat. He claims we were even more fatuous then. When the French surrendered we were all upset since it meant the end of shore leave for the rest of the summer, and we spent those months living quietly, fed by wireless rumors, and one day intercepted a plain-language signal pleading for rope and small boats from anyone in the vicinity of Dunkirk. As we were many miles north, all we did by way of response was to wonder at the reason for the break in radio discipline, while we sailed about like imbeciles, amazed at such empty seas.

  After Dunkirk the expectation was that the Germans would invade from either Normandy or Norway, and the RAF had to concentrate on France, so that left our submarine fleet to provide adequate advance warning of any flotilla from the north. The Royal Navy had a total of twelve submarines to dedicate to that work, including ours. Together we were responsible for 1,300 kilometers of Norwegian coastline, although the good news was that military intelligence had decided we could focus on those few ports from which a sizable offensive force could be mounted. Our orders upon sighting such a formation were to report and then to attack. To report would require us to surface within view of the enemy, which would render the attack part of the directive irrelevant unless their gunners were blind, and the real question would be whether we’d even finish the broadcast. Each submarine had been provided with a padlocked chest of English pounds and Swedish kronor so that those of us bypassed by the invasion could in the event it was successful refuel in Göteborg or some other neutral port and then cross the Atlantic to carry on the fight from the New World.

  To evade Luftwaffe patrols, particularly given the onset of white nights, by June we were submerged nineteen hours daily, and gambling that we could recharge our batteries and refresh our oxygen supply between enemy air sweeps. Those who lost that bet were devastated on the surface. At the end of nineteen hours our atmosphere was so thin that matches wouldn’t light and even at rest we heaved like mountain climbers. American and German submarines were equipped with telescopic breathing tubes that could breach the water like periscopes, but when we proposed the same for our submarines we were told there was no tactical requirement for such a fitting. Our Treasury feared spending a million pounds to save a hundred million, our captain said bitterly, and its ranks were filled with rows of mincing clerks cutting corners.

  As our periods submerged lengthened, our medical officer lectured us in small groups about the danger signs of carbon dioxide poisoning. Night after night just as breathing became all but impossible we were saved by a little low cloud providing just enough cover to surface. With the hatches opened, the boat revived from the control room aft to the engine room, though that didn’t do much for the torpedo room, so Mills and I and our mates were allowed to come to the bridge two at a time for fifteen minutes of fresh air.

  But we weren’t safe e
ven below. In calm weather the Norway Deep is clear as crystal, and we could be seen down to ninety feet, which we learned on our first day off the coast when six dive-bombers took their turns with us before heading home.

  Around the solstice some nights never did get fully dark, and in the horrible half-light one after another of our boats was destroyed when it was finally forced to surface: the Spearfish, the Salmon, the Sturgeon, the Trusty, the Truant, the Thames. By July losses totaled 75 percent of those ships engaged. During one of our agonizing waits on the surface two Me-109s dropped out of the clouds and we could hear the pom pom of their cannon fire over the watch’s screaming as he plummeted down the ladder, and while we submerged a gunner’s mate snapped in his distress and beat himself senseless by pounding his forehead against his torpedo tube. He had doubled his jersey up over the steel first, to muffle the sound.

  The invasion failed to materialize but we remained on station nevertheless, weathering the autumn and winter storms. During the worst of them we alternated at the watch, poking our faces and flooded binoculars into the wind’s teeth, riding up wall after wall of steep and chaotic waves, and maintaining a twenty-four-hour vigilance in case the impossible happened and an enemy funnel coalesced, the captain struggling to keep the sextant dry long enough to snatch a star sight and gain a clue as to our whereabouts. In the heaviest gales the breaking waves poured in over the conning tower and filled the control room below, sparking the switchboards and washing through the entire ship. The hatches had to stand open because when the diesels could no longer draw air they stalled, so a stoker with a great suction hose would squeeze atop the tower beside the watch, absorbing the battering as he pumped the water back out.

  One moonless night soon after surfacing I was on watch with the captain and two others, and all around in the darkness ship after ship appeared out of the mist, the hulls of transports rising above us like slabs of cliffs. We had run head-on into a full convoy, ascending inside the ring of their escorts, whose attentions were all trained out to sea. There was no time to dive and attack from periscope depth, nor to estimate the correct angles.

  “What’s the old rough rule?” the captain whispered, extending his hand toward the first transport. “If the enemy is slow, give him nine degrees of lead, or the width of a human hand at arm’s length.” With his fist as a gunsight over the bow, he set the firing interval through the voice-pipe, then shouted, “Fire!” At the launch of each torpedo we could feel the ship lurch slightly backward, and before leaving the bridge we watched a huge column of water erupt from one of our targets, followed by a thump. He shouted, “Dive!” and plunged down the ladder, and underwater we heard two more huge, far-off bangs at the correct running ranges, and the entire crew cheered. We went deep for hours, hanging silently, those of us off duty forbidden even to move since the clink of a dropped key could expose us, while we listened to the concussions of the sub hunters’ depth charges growing closer, then farther, then closer, until finally the German Navy seemed to run out of explosives.

  On my last leave at home after the Norway patrols my cousin Margery insisted on bringing me round to her favorite pub and there a whole series of men with whom she seemed utterly at ease insisted on buying me drinks. “I didn’t know you had a favorite pub,” I told her, and she said, “Why would you?” She added that I should see her friends, and that her background had not prepared her for the amount some girls could drink. I asked if she had a favorite friend and she cited a girl named Jeanette who had an up-to-date mother who allowed them to smoke in the house. I continually had to repeat myself over the din of the place and when she finally asked with some exasperation why I couldn’t speak up, I told her that almost everyone in the crew had what the doctors called fatigue-laryngitis from having reduced our voices to whispers for months in our attempts to outwit the enemy’s hydrophones. She apologized, and when I told her it was nothing she took my hand.

  One of her friends from a table nearby after a harangue with his mates asked me to settle the matter of whether the English had in fact invented the submarine. “Not hardly,” I answered, and he said but hadn’t the English always led in naval innovations? Who’d invented the broadside? Who’d converted the world from sail to steam? From coal to oil? And what about turret guns? “What about them,” I asked. And Margery chided him that I wasn’t allowed to talk shop, and that we needed some privacy to discuss family, thank you.

  Once we were left alone she asked how my family was getting on, and I told her that my mother had reported she was enduring both my absence and the nightly bombing raids with a puzzling calm. When I asked after her family, Margery reminded me that they all remained greatly concerned about her older brother Jimmy, who was with the RAF and had already lost many friends. She said that now when he returned home on his leaves her mother and sister wore hypnotized looks and their conversations never strayed from speculations about the weather. And that Jimmy had in confidence told her some horrible stories. I suggested that perhaps he shouldn’t have, and she responded that she’d known her entire life that the world beyond her home was stunning and heartless, and that all she’d ever heard from her mother about the protection afforded by an adherence to the rules was wrong. While she was speaking she seemed to scan the room first and then to focus on the nearer details of my face.

  On our way home in the darkness of the blackout she said that she’d always been fond of me, and I said that she couldn’t imagine how fond I’d been of her, and she pulled me into an alley and kissed me, and my chest felt like it did when I was running as a boy, and as her kiss continued her mouth flooded mine with pleasure. When I got hold of my senses I gripped her head and kissed her back. Finally she pulled away and said that we had to get home. While we walked she remarked that there was some rule-breaking for you: first cousins, kissing.

  We stopped on her front step. She was lit for a moment when someone waiting up for her peeked through a blackout curtain. She said I should take care of myself. I grasped her hands, still dumbstruck and happy. She asked if she could tell me something, and then waited for my assent. She said that during some of the family gatherings we spent seated beside one another at dining tables it had been for her as if the stillness we made together were like a third person who was neither of us and both, and that when she’d felt the most sad and alone it had helped to imagine herself creeping into that third person who was half hers and half mine.

  Did I have a sense of what she meant? she asked after a moment. I told her I did, though some part of it had confused me, and I worried that even in the darkness she could hear that. Well, she said, maybe it would come to me, and she said good night, and kissed my cheek, and the next morning I was off to the Pacific.

  We sailed for Singapore through Gibraltar with a merchant convoy bound for Alexandria, and left the convoy to stop over in Beirut, which provided our first sight of a camel outside of a zoo, and where we painted our gray ship dark green for its Far Eastern tour, and from there proceeded to Haifa and Port Said and the Red Sea and on to Aden and the Pacific War. The entire time I castigated myself for the inadequacy of my response to my cousin’s overtures. Before we’d left Harwich the captain had addressed the crew, announcing that we could all settle back and prepare ourselves for a long journey filled with indescribable discomforts. We’d taken him to be joking.

  Our initial view of Singapore was a towering column of black smoke on the horizon. When we docked at the naval base jetty the captain went ashore in his whites to inquire as to where to lodge his men. He found everyone in headquarters burning records, and was told that our allotted accommodation had been destroyed by bombs that afternoon.

  While he searched for an alternative we remained aboard. The bombing resumed, and with the harbor too shallow to dive, the hatches had to be kept shut or the splashes from the impacts would swamp us. A few of the torpedomen beside me who I thought were dozing turned out to have fainted from the heat. Everyone else just waited. We were all losing so much sweat the decks we
re slick underfoot. After an hour of the concussions one of the stokers went wild and tore down all the wardroom pinup girls before his mates restrained him.

  Around sundown the captain returned with the news that he’d finally located the rear admiral for Malaya inspecting the chit-book in the rubble of the officers’ club, and he’d offered us his house in the hills. A commandeered truck transferred those off duty, and the rest of us had to make do in the boiling confines of the boat.

  The next morning black clouds hung over the entire waterfront from the burning oil and rubber dumps and we refitted and loaded any supplies that we could in the chaos. The last provisions aboard were crates of Horlicks malted milk and Australian cough drops. When we cast off, one old woman with a spade was digging herself a private air-raid trench in the garden of the Raffles Hotel. To the east the sky was filled with high-altitude bombers, and once clear of the harbor we submerged, and as we rounded the channel buoy the captain at the periscope reported a convoy of our own troop transports arriving. He could make out the standards of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. The whole ship went silent at the thought of what they were disembarking into.

  We chugged three thousand miles west. We started leaking oil. One night I worked my way back to the wardroom, where the chief and the captain were sitting and talking quietly so as not to disturb the sleepers. They invited me to join them, and as they chatted about where they might be this time the following year, and the perversities of women, and the favorite pubs they had known, I fell asleep with my head on the wardroom table, and for days afterward they joked about how much they apparently had bored me. A gunlayer on his watch at last spotted a swallow, and the next afternoon a stoker sighted an old boot, and in the end we made Colombo Harbor in Ceylon. For two weeks no one had spoken except to give or to acknowledge orders.