That said, it seemed to me of late that I was provoking more than my share of antipathy: from Liam, from Steve, from Margaret, occasionally from Ryan or Sylvain. Even Angela had singled me out the previous day—unjustifiably, I felt—over the careless husbandry of my dishes and eating utensils. She had refused to prepare my noodles at lunch because she didn’t have a proper container to put them in. I explained to her that I had left my big purple mug outside her bivouac, as she had requested, and felt aggrieved when she said she hadn’t noticed it and had assumed I’d lost it overboard as I’d lost so many of my other items.
I am not overly concerned about how others see me, but nor did I want to become a pariah on a small, crowded boat where there was no hope of even temporary sanctuary. That afternoon, I asked Steve what he thought it was about my attitude that was pissing so many people off. In a sense I was setting myself up, but I trusted him. I told him I’d noticed that the more crap he threw at Angela regarding her captaincy, the more she seemed to cleave to him, to respect him.
“I think it’s your arrogance,” he told me, half joking, to which I responded that I couldn’t think of one thing I’d done aboard, including showing up late for watch, that was inarguably arrogant.
He looked at me with a very precise Charlie Chan grin and said, “No, but writing about it is.”
I thought about this for a moment and allowed that maybe it was true, but only in a sense so broad as to be almost meaningless. Deep down, I believed something less direct had raised Liam’s hackles—something beyond the mere fact of my showing up late for watch or my intent to write about the voyage. If it had been Tom or Louise or David, he would not have reacted as he did. And he would not have gotten away with it if he had; no one would have tolerated it. If I were to guess, I’d say he had become emboldened under Steve’s influence and, in that mode, had loaded up his side-iron as much for Steve’s approval as for the collective well-being of the boat.
Liam would eventually fall into his own version of the Delinquent Life of Charles, evident to the rest of us when, a little later in the voyage, in the middle of the night, he began getting up out of the stroke seat perhaps once a watch and disappearing mysteriously beyond the bridge, sometimes for as long as ten or twelve minutes. One night on the 2-to-4 a.m., Steve asked me in genuine puzzlement, “Where do you think Liam goes when he gets up?” Out of respect for his rowing, nobody questioned his choosing to take a break in the middle of the night if that’s what he wanted to do.
“I guess he’s eating,” I said. “He must be hungry.” However, why anybody would be eating in the smelly blackness of the cabin at three in the morning, with no place to sit and nothing to eat but protein turds, was beyond my reckoning. And so the mystery continued, until one day, quite out of the blue, I heard someone from the other watch mention casually that Liz seemed to be exhausted—couldn’t get through a watch in the middle of the night without a ten-or-twelve-minute break.
In retrospect, I am amused by my naïveté. The “friendship” so obvious between Liz and Liam during the daytime had clearly become a night-timer, and since they were hot-bunking anyway, it was but a trifle for them to timetable a bit of snogging during the wee hours.
In daylight, Liz would often sit for an hour on one of the stern holds in front of Liam as he rowed—talking softly, telling stories, or simply smiling or gazing (she had the readiest and most engaging of smiles). Or she would appear with her camera and take half a dozen close-ups of the young doctor from Norwich and his oar.
In the sun, Liam wore an unlikely black hat, a kind of Tilley affair, high-tech, that was a size too small for him, so that it sat high on his conk, giving him the appearance of a mad Jesuit or sixteenth-century Inquisitionist. I had been intrigued to hear that in his interview for admission to medical school at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, near his home, he had, rather than wallow or fabricate when asked why he wanted to be a physician, recited the hoary old dick-tickler “Invictus,” by William Ernest Henley, which for rhetorical extravagance puts even “If” by Rudyard Kipling in the shade. “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.” Beyond his poetical choices, I thought it bold of Liam to have taken the time off before his graduation exams, running the risk of messing up his career, to row across the ocean.
One terrible night, about two weeks hence, in heavy seas and hard rain, I stood up for a break at the end of the 2 a.m. watch, turned to the bow of the boat and simply stared into the night as the hull rose and fell perhaps twenty feet at a bounce. For nearly two hours, I had taken one wave after another, and was at the end of my tolerance. Dylan, who had been rowing in front of me, had retreated to the bridge, and Ernst was sitting with his head between his knees as sea water teemed onto his back. I didn’t know where Liam was—didn’t know much at all at that moment, except that I was cold and cored, and my hips and shoulders ached, and more than anything I wanted the watch to be over so that I could get inside into the bunk where for two blessed hours I would not have to row. As I stood in that benumbed state, a pair of jacketed arms slipped in under mine from behind and, before I had had a chance to react, gripped me in such a powerful embrace that I could not move—and after a few seconds didn’t want to, such was the warmth and reassurance of this anonymous and welcome hug. As the seconds passed, and the embrace held, I permitted myself a kind of cottony descent into whatever vortex or rabbit hole seemed suddenly to be opening beneath me. It was not the first time, in the exhaustion of the wee hours, that I had experienced some private level of transport, perhaps even hallucination, but it was the first time under near-torturous conditions that I had felt buoyed or comforted by whatever forces were afoot within or around me. For what seemed five minutes but was probably no more than ten seconds, I indulged in the sensation of being suspended, then of falling, and on a whim reached back over my shoulders, thinking to grip the head of whoever was accompanying me down.
But there was no head. And now no arms. And I turned, expecting to see Louise or Sylvain or Steve, all of whom are huggy sorts of people. But it was slim Liam Flynn who was standing there on the tramp, perhaps five feet behind me, wearing a spectral grin in the shadowy red glow of the trench lights. We stared briefly at one another, and I said, “Thank you, Liam—I appreciated that.”
But he did not speak, and in the seconds that followed, time collapsed, and I was asleep in my bunk and then awake again as the ten-minute call sounded, and we were up and frantic and scrambling to get out the door before the sea shaman snatched us.
Not everybody, incidentally, was enthralled with Liz and Liam’s rather impressive abandonment of decorum. I heard one crew member say she “thought less of Liz” for keeping herself engaged on the night shift. But the comment may have been mere envy. Perhaps typically, any disapproval of Liam had more to do with his occasional shirking of responsibilities than being a bit of a sport. Personally, I thought more of Liz for her attitude and activities, whatever they amounted to. It does after all take gumption and imagination—not to mention a certain discreet athleticism—to enact a restrained pas de deux over a period of weeks in a bedroom the size of a steamer trunk shared with fifteen other people. As I told Liz during the weeks after getting back, I’d rather be in the Guinness Book of World Records for what she and Liam achieved than for getting quickly across the Atlantic (I doubt somehow that there were many romances aboard Hallin or Sara G). She responded rather coyly and with a trace of indignation, “Liam and I were very special friends, but we were just friends—there was no other stuff.” She scanned my face, looking for signs that I was buying it. After a few seconds I said, “I’m sorry to hear that,” and she busted a smile, and implored me to put in my book that she and Liam were “special friends” and there had been no “other stuff,” and I assured her that I would pass the message along.
11
“WEAR SOMETHING WARM,” SYLVAIN told me quietly as he came into the cabin at 2 a.m. on our twelfth night out of Tarfaya. He had been so cold during the la
st half hour of the watch that he had taken shelter, briefly, in the port hold (along with a desalinator, a quarter ton of food, eight or ten survival suits, four inches of bilge water, and a few cubic feet of “air” that, while toasty in its mutant appeal, made the stench in the cabin seem a heady and welcome idyll). By 6 a.m., we were running heavy chop and twenty-five-foot breakers directly into our teeth. At about 7 a.m., still in the dark, a wave came so hard over the bow onto my back that it knocked my head forward into my oar handle, leaving me not so much physically as emotionally rankled, deeply frustrated with weather that had begun to seem irreversible.
Half an hour later, in the coming light of dawn, Angela stuck her head out the front hatch and announced that according to her GPS, we were no longer making headway but were moving farther from our destination, and that to everybody’s relief she was shutting things down. There was no longer any point in expending our energy.
By 8:15 the oars were stowed, the sea anchor was out, and we had begun a day of shiftless, well-fed indolence. For the most part we continued to alternate watches, or at least shadow watches, half of us on deck, half in the bunks. However, as the day wore on and our indolence deepened, some chose to share their bunks, sitting sideways, or curled up lengthwise like strands of DNA, or head to toe, as we had done when we were kids—all amidst a proliferating mess of clothing, food, bedding, garbage, toiletries, electronics, not to mention elbows and knees and shoulders, sixteen people, all of them wrestling for space in a cabin that, by rights, was perhaps adequate for four or five crew members and no more.
It hardly needs pointing out that there was an intimacy to it, a compulsory familiarity with everyone’s digestion and body chemistry and “table manners”—and breathing and spatial phobias and skin (in some cases far more of their rashes and scars and private dermatological wrinkles than even their doctors will ever need to know about). It was Facebook and Arsebook and Farcebook. At the same time, there was a kind of freedom to it all, the sense, ironically, of an open zone, beyond the orthodoxies of authority and confidentiality, where we felt safe to talk, to exchange otherwise unspoken chapters from our personal histories. For nearly an hour that afternoon, for example, Sylvain laid out the through line on his peculiar, sometimes cultish, boyhood in Montreal, where his parents had subjected him to an all but insufferable evangelical Catholicism. Week after week, rather than meeting in a recognized sanctuary, the family had trooped around to apostolic gatherings in private homes—to prayer meetings, to Bible studies, to discussion conclaves, often led by young and radical priests, although not nearly radical enough for Sylvain. He said to me at one point, “I’d ask them, ‘But how, my friend—how do you know that what you’re teaching is true? You were not there! You’re telling us things that are scientifically impossible. What is the basis of your belief in all of this?’”
The result of his indoctrination—his “brainwashing,” as he described it—was that by the age of twelve or thirteen he had grown to detest not only Catholicism and the priests but to detest Christianity. “I detested Christ,” he said flatly. “The little bleeding figure on the cross.” For a one-time Catholic, the admission was a daring flirtation with spiritual oblivion—or perhaps with spiritual certainty.
By his late teens, he had evolved a rigorously pragmatic skepticism, a kind of internalized screening lens through which he scrutinized every ideal, every person, every fact and fancy that crossed his path. Several weeks into medical school at the University of Ottawa during the 1980s, he openly questioned the need for professors, some of whom he perceived were going through the motions, delivering their lectures from old ward or diagnostic notes, in which he had no interest. He decided to kiss them off. And with a group of equally subversive fellow students proceeded to study medicine on his own. “We went to the labs,” he told me. “We did the clinical work with the others. That was all.” At the end of the term, he and his fellow irregulars wrote the exams and did fine and carried on, Sylvain into a career in the emergency ward, where for more than two decades he has stitched up knife wounds and brought heart attacks under control and flushed out poisons. Sylvain has rounded, Gallic features and speaks an inflected but poetic English. And when he was finished his story, he looked at me for several seconds with the sort of steady, reptilian gaze that a cobra might apply to a mouse before swallowing it whole. “Charles,” he said with hypnotic solemnity, “what is the meaning of life?”
I laughed, and eventually quoted him the old standby about Truth and Beauty being all we have to know.
“Who said that?” he asked without relinquishing his gaze.
“John Keats,” I told him, at which point his face softened, and he said quietly, “Who is John Keats?”
“An English poet,” I said. “Early eighteen hundreds.”
“And if truth and beauty are all we have to know,” he now inquired, “what about ugliness?”
“I think that’s in the truth part,” I said, to which he nodded and, out of his own instinct for truth, revealed that as a kid he had thrown pepper in his brother’s eyes and that his father, in a rage, had declared that the brother would go blind. “To prove it wasn’t true,” said Sylvain, “I got the pepper and poured it into my own eyes, so they were black with it, and I went up to my dad and looked at him through the pepper and I said, “Et voilà, Papa—je ne suis pas aveugle!”
ALL NIGHT we struggled to get and stay comfortable, or if not exactly comfortable at least positioned in such a way as to avoid extreme discomfort, so that we could get some sleep. At a point just past 9 p.m., Sylvain, with whom I was inextricably knotted up in the bunk, said to me, “Charles, there’s one thing troubles me.”
“Only one?” I asked, raising my head, anticipating some complex reassessment of the meaning of life, or the nature of truth or beauty.
“Will you still respect me in the morning?” he said, drawing a laugh from those around and above us.
“I don’t respect you now,” I told him. “I might if you let me get some sleep.”
But it was easier said than done. Within twenty minutes I was so appallingly uncomfortable that I squeezed out into the alleyway, where the space was equally crowded, but where I was at least free of the assorted lumpy dry bags at the bottom of the bunk and the net storage hammocks laden with food and kit and pharmaceuticals that were forever in the way of one’s head or shoulder or knees.
At some point the previous afternoon, Ernst had compared our crowded vessel to the slave ships of the 1700s, adding that it stank like them too. While surely no match for the floating prisons of old (slave carriers are said to have announced themselves several miles off with their stench), Big Blue was stifling to the point where at perhaps 11 p.m. I was galvanized by a need to get out of the cabin, for fear the nausea I was experiencing was about to erupt into something more colorful. It is difficult to convey the near-panic, the nightmarish claustrophobia, that comes of being unable to stand up, even to reconfigure one’s tortured limbs and hips, because there were simply too many people in too small an enclosure. Meanwhile, the boat continued to heave with unprecedented fury, the waves to explode beneath the cabin floor. One such blast at perhaps midnight had several of us convinced that the floor had been shattered and that at any moment in the darkness we would feel the ocean rising around us.
The space, I might add, was functionally lightless, except for a tiny green signal that blinked from Louise’s EPIRB, which hung in the bunk she shared with Tom. The device’s connection to a satellite service in the U.S., or perhaps Europe, was the sole means by which the boat was being tracked from land. Later that night, Tom, unable to sleep for the blinking pin light, and unaware of its significance (it was typical of Big Blue that no one had explained it to us), began randomly pressing buttons on the thing, succeeding not just in turning it off but inadvertently cutting ties with the rest of the world. For all anybody ashore knew, Big Blue had gone to the bottom, or had been seized by pirates, or by midshipman Wilkins fed up with the boat’s divisi
veness and turpitude and all-but-total disrespect for punctuality.
For my purposes at that point, it would have helped to have a flashlight. Perhaps typically, mine, a crummy little LED contraption with a battery the size of a sesame seed, had burned out on the fourth day. My headlamp, another Chinese modeschmuck, had burned out on the seventh. David had kindly supplied each bunk with a stick-on wall light a little smaller than a hockey puck, but ours had already lost half its power, and to turn it on would have awakened others. Not that I could have found it anyway when I was scrunched up in the alley. At such times, you literally could not rise and take even a baby step without crunching someone’s fingers or feet. Nevertheless, I tried, and succeeded in raising myself at a strange angle, imagining that I could next take a step into a teensy but apparently unoccupied corner of the alley. As I did so, however, my foot fell not on plywood but on a lumpish ball, and I realized too late that my naked and salty toes were now splayed across Louise’s temple and forehead. “Uhh... excuse me,” she said as I whispered apologies and settled, chastened, into the torturous Plywood Maiden that was the rear alleyway of the cabin.
Little Ship of Fools Page 14