Peninsula Sinking

by David Huebert

SITZPINKLER

  Miles does not tell the bartender about his mother or the old Nazi. He does not mention the Botox fiasco because (a) the bartender is a stranger and (b) that was months ago now and the droopy-eyed military psychologist at Stadacona says he should be getting over it. What Miles does tell the bartender, after three double Caesars and a margarita, is that he’s going back underway in two days and it’s a strange thing going to bed each night fearing the same dream of sinking, lost, through amniotic dark. A strange thing to live with a species of dread that makes your brain feel waterlogged. And strange, once you’re down there, to spend most of your time sitting in front of the sonar console listening up to the surface or sending out pings and thinking maybe the hatch is going to buckle and leave fifty-nine submariners scrambling for their lives. Maybe the oxygen’s going to fail and everyone on board will get giddy then grumpy-delirious before realizing they’re all dying of anoxia.

  The bartender is a bald guy with the eyes of a wise reptile and he keeps asking more questions so Miles tells him about channel fever and his masochistic fitness-crazed XO and then gets going on psychological training. How there basically is none. How he got back from a thirty-day stint two weeks ago and now he’s going down for 105 more and what they tell you during a full year of training is grit your teeth. That after your 105 you get two weeks paid leave and just focus on that when you’re breathing thin air and sharing one shower and a tiny sleeping rack with fifty-eight other seamen. What they tell you is that you are special and that not many people can handle the life of a submariner, that you were made for stealth and trained for seclusion, that you are one of the Canadian military’s most elite assets, an essential defender of Arctic sovereignty, and the free world will thank you for your service.

  The bartender has a white guy name—Chris or Steve or Dylan or Blane. A name bland as flour. A name so normal Miles makes a mental note to not attempt to remember it while he tells Chris or Bryan or Eric or Rob about the prospect of 105 days without WiFi or any way of contacting the outside world.

  The bartender asks well didn’t you sign up for this and Miles says yes. Yes he signed up for this but at what point does that cease to matter? At what point are you out of options? At what point have you maxed out five credit cards and can’t get another and you have no degree and your former Hitler Youth father who is twenty-five years older than your perma-tanned mother says he’ll bail you out financially if you sign up for the military? At what point do you think fuck it maybe you could actually quit smoking weed and get a free education so you sign up and because you’re stupid, because you miss blasting your Yamaha off kickers and buying surfboards when you feel like it, you decide to sign up for submarine duty. Sonar panel. Sign up for weeks and months under water with fifty-four men and five women and the smell of all of them festering and nothing to console you but whale songs.

  “Whale songs?”

  “Yeah. Mostly humpback. Humpback’s the best. They’re all over YouTube, you just—”

  Miles stops then. Realizes he’s being rude and makes a point of asking the bartender about himself. Asks Chris or Matt or Will or Derek whether he’s upset to be working on Christmas Day and the handsome reptile just shrugs and says “time and a half.” Miles finishes his watery rye and ginge and orders another and the bartender circulates, picking up glasses from tables because he’s the only person working the only dingy pub in the city that’s open at 10 p.m. on Christmas Day.

  People continue to clack and scuff in, knocking the snow off their boots as they trudge through the door. Three ryes later a girl sits beside Miles, her hair pulled up to show a leopard-print pattern dyed into her scalp and Miles has never seen a hairstyle that so closely resembles an undergarment. He doesn’t say this, though. He says “Merry Christmas” and she says she’s not Christian and he says that’s too bad because there are so many things he would like to confess.

  He guesses gin and tonic and she lets it happen.

  She says her mother’s babysitting and she’s already half twisted and we’re all going to need sewing kits tomorrow because this is a proper tear. Before long she gets the bartender doing tequilas and whiskeys and then she’s throwing salt in the eyes of a man who attempts an arm sling, tells Miles he’s become a dear, dear friend.

  At some point last call occurs. The bartender heads into the office and turns off the security camera and comes back out with an off-book bottle of Jameson. The strangest part of the night is not when the bartender—the place now dribbling patrons into the snow-shagged Christmas streets—leans over and hurls a thin stream of bile into the sink before turning back to the pint he was pouring, not even washing his hands.

  The strangest part of the night comes later. Comes when a gregarious blind man with a bowl cut walks around handing out mushrooms and Miles takes some because all the drug testing is done and there’s not much the forces can do once he’s underway.

  Soon afterwards Miles and the bartender and the leopard-print princess end up back at the blind man’s house with the remnant stumblers. They learn that the blind man’s name is Wilber and that he keeps pigeons. He’s bringing pigeon carrying back. He is sending messages to pigeon keepers in Yarmouth and Fredericton and as far as Montreal. When the power goes out, he is going to be a valuable man.

  “That is so North End,” purrs the leopard.

  By the end of the night Miles is dreamy and jagged from mushrooms and booze and he keeps checking whether there’s snot on his face because everything feels leaky. He finishes Wilber’s saccharine port and then circles the party for his leopard-print prowler but someone says she’s already gone home with the bartender.

  Miles asks Wilber whether he can see the homing pigeons so Wilber takes his arm and they walk together out into the yard. A large red shed where the birds are chirping and skittering in their separate cells, all of them wearing aluminum anklets.

  When Wilber told him about the pigeons, Miles had pictured them as part of a heroic medievalish universe full of chainmail and torches and buxom sorceresses straddling taxidermied bears. But they’re just pigeons, a species of bird the old Nazi calls “sky rats.” Squawking and filthy and nipping each other. The floor a Pangaea of bird shit.

  Miles is thinking how horrible, what a desolate life to be locked up like this and presumably carrying all the toxins and diseases a city can spew. The shrooms are peaking and everything feels slanted and awful and he is waiting for a Hitchcock hand to pull back the shower curtain.

  And then Wilber walks over. Lets go of Miles’ arm and approaches his pigeons, cooing, his voice a song gurgled underwater. Opens one of their cages and lets a grey and black bird crawl out onto his arm-guard. Smiles towards Miles and says, “This is Rex Murphy.”

  The bird’s naked pink feet crawl onto Wilber’s leathered forearm and he feeds it a cracker morsel from his pocket. Rex Murphy bends over to eat and Miles sees its neck, realizing for the first time that pigeons have some beautiful colouration there, a glimmer of muted fuchsia blending into green then back again. A delightful chromatic accordion wheezing through his mind. The bird pecks at the cracker and Wilber reaches out and strokes its breast and Miles thinks it might be the most intimate thing he has ever seen.

  The song of the humpback whale is always a love song. Constantly evolving within the dialects of the eleven major worldwide populations, the humpbacks’ undersea chorus is a perpetual conversation that qualifies as music according to all known definitions. It develops collectively and constantly, an oral tradition that has been evolving for thirty million years. Only male humpbacks sing, and their song is thought to be part of an elaborate courtship ritual, the most complex in the animal world. But even as they sing to impress or seduce females, humpbacks also sing with one another, voices crooning together as they sound their mournful dirge. The requiem rendered all the more lovely to the human ear by this lack of words—the beautiful confusion of a language beyond sense or underst
anding.

  Miles wakes up at 2 p.m. still a little high, a fierce hangover lurking. His phone buzzing, “Dad Dad” blinking across the name display. “Dad Dad” being the name in his contacts list alongside “Jeff FlooR hockey” and “Suzy High School.”

  “There’s my little Sitzpinkler,” croons the old Nazi, his voice an oil spill. Since the age of seven or eight, Miles’ father’s pet name for him has been “Sitzpinkler,” a German word meaning a man who sits down to pee.

  “Hey Dad.”

  “Don’t ‘hey’ me.”

  “What? Hello?”

  “Merry Christmas, son.”

  “It’s Boxing Day.”

  “Let’s get lunch.”

  “Nothing’s open.”

  “Something’s open. Be there in fifteen.”

  Perhaps it’s not fair that he thinks of his father as “the old Nazi.” The man, after all, never served in the SS or any other military force. He was actually born in a suburb of Frankfurt in 1944, the son of an Austrian heiress and a prominent newspaper editor who was once photographed shaking hands with Joseph Goebbels. What is disturbing, for Miles, is that his father has never spoken about the war, that septic wound in the family psyche. The old man has never offered a hint about what his father may or may not have done to protect his family or the nation. And so the facts Miles knows are few. He knows that as a small child Rolf often ate potatoes that looked as if they had insect legs growing out of them. He knows that Rolf watched his mother die refusing food during the savage winter of 1948. The rations reduced and his mother’s creamy skin turning pale, rising into harried continents of rash. His mother scrambling to the toilet to relieve her diarrhea, delirious from thirst but still refusing to eat, insisting that they give all the food to the boy. Afterwards, at his father’s insistence, the boy began learning English and French and practising the violin five hours a day. Miles knows that some years later Rolf got his Ph.D. at the Max Plank Institute and headed overseas to research plankton reproductive cellular anatomy at Dalhousie. That he has spent his life publishing and conferencing and teaching frantically, almost vicious in his belief that hard work is the only cure for life’s nameless, gnawing litany of symptoms.

  Rolf is among the smartest, most accomplished people Miles has ever met and so what frustrates him is that the old man will never change. Himself a permanent resident, he will continue to call people he doesn’t know “immigrants” or “foreigners” based solely on appearance. When Miles mentions his old friend Dan, his father will continue to say, “Ah yes Daniel, the Jew.” In spite of Facebook wars with near strangers and persistent pleas from his son, Rolf will maintain that women simply can’t do hard science and that Merkel’s immigration policy has caused an upswing in crime. All of this torments Miles not just because his father is a self-righteous bigot but because he knows that here is a man who has never really listened, never simply submitted, never just rested for a moment to ponder the shape of a leaf or a cloud, never given himself over to love.

  The old Nazi picks him up in the new Mercedes and Miles is thinking when did Mercedes start making hideous SUVs but of course he doesn’t say this. He looks out the window at the new shipyard and the harbour water beyond and asks his dad how his research is coming. His father grunts, then puts in a piece of Nicorette and chews it fast. Rolf has been chewing Nicorette since he quit smoking thirty years ago. He always chews it furiously, as if by working his jaw hungrily enough he might transform that scrub of minty alkaloid back into the rich lungful of smoke and tar he’s been craving for decades.

  At the Italian restaurant on Spring Garden—walls a pornography of Siciliana—it’s difficult to hear each other speak. Difficult to converse with the clamour of waiters and plates and men with gleaming shirt collars ordering wines from regions they can’t pronounce.

  Miles broaches retirement and the old man—almost eighty now—grumbles about the pissant dean trying to force him out and then bites into a fresh white rectangle. The waiter brings their plates and Rolf balls his Nicorette and sticks it at the perimeter of his rigatoni. After a few bites, Rolf says into his plate, “So you’re going under tomorrow?” Miles says yes and his father gives him a little grunt that Miles generously interprets as “Good for you.” Joining the military being the first thing Miles ever did that his father did not openly criticize. Silence being, apparently, the closest he can come to praise without melting into a steaming puddle of liquefied Saxon pride.

  “A hundred and five days,” Miles says.

  Forking, chewing. No verbal response.

  Risking everything: “I’ll miss you.”

  Rolf’s eyes leap up and ask whether they just heard what they think they just heard. Miles does not deny it. Rolf glances around the dining room to see who might be listening.

  They finish their meal, conversation withering like a deked kiss.

  The waiter clears their lunch dishes and Rolf orders two espressos without making eye contact, which is when Miles turns a little reckless. Decides to ask about his mother. Because when you have a parent who has recently passed away sometimes all you really want is to sit and talk about it with the other parent. So while they sit there staring into tiny espresso cups he thinks might as well. Going under tomorrow and he doesn’t want to be lying in his bunk thinking why didn’t he so he makes an attempt.

  “So.”

  “Yes?” Rolf upends his espresso, dabs the crème from his moustache.

  “Well—”

  His father’s eyebrows become a jagged question mark.

  “It’s just a bit strange that you haven’t said anything about Mum yet.”

  An exhale. Then, surely, revelation.

  “What would you like me to say?”

  “Anything, basically.”

  Rolf considers this. Exhales operatically. “The whole thing is just ludicrous. Humiliating. I mean—” Rolf can barely bring himself to utter: “Botox.” As if that was everything that could ever need to be said. As if in no universe would he ever have to address the possibility of his son’s hurt or acknowledge that he had once loved this woman.

  Miles waves for the cheque, feels himself already descending into the great dark world below.

  Miles sits in front of the sonar console with twenty-five seamen in the control room and Lieutenant Panchaud announcing: “Descending now, descending now.” His eyes on the depth meter and his hydrophone swirling as he listens for anything unusual, hearing only the drone of propellers as Panchaud calls out ten metres, twenty, finally sixty below. On the radar there are fishing boats and freighters and container ships to watch for, even the odd mine left over from World War II.

  The HMCS Atlantis is Victoria-class and looks basically how you imagine a submarine: a giant black tampon wearing an adorable top hat. The Atlantis is a diesel-electric Cold War relic built by the Royal Navy and, now that Canada has abandoned nuclear submarines, consigned to spend its dotage patrolling the colonies with the odd detour to Asia.

  As the Atlantis begins its long northward cruise at sixty metres below, Miles’ body twitches a little. The world above goes distant, vague. An embrace forgotten in the murk of dream. Tiny spasms in his quads and calves and he remembers this sensation from his last mission. Remembers his body always readying itself to bolt. Muscles twitching and flaring, but there is nowhere to go. Not even a treadmill and no matter how many push-ups or crunches you do there is no getting rid of the jolts.

  So Miles imagines the water all around him. Pictures the endless dark blanket unfurling over underwater mountain ranges and gaping abysses. Miles thinks about the course the Atlantis will take—past the shelf break and straight over the great skid of the Laurentian Cove, keeping north of the Sohm as they turn to skirt the Grand Banks, passing just east of the Milne Seamount, then drifting over the Flemish cap and onwards into the North Atlantic Mid-Ocean Canyon, their corridor to the Arctic. The contours of the
ocean floor begin to mould his mind and he feels himself a blind man seeing clouds for the first time.

  “Heard about your mother,” Panchaud says. Lieutenant Panchaud is acting XO, a steel-bellied man of about forty who is generally either doing crunches in the torpedo room or standing over panels in the control room, burrowing his pinky into his ear.

  “Aye-aye, sir.” Miles has the headphones on, listening for abnormalities and hoping for biologics.

  “Botox?” Panchaud says, driving his pinky deeper.

  Miles admits yeah, Botox.

  The XO laughs and Miles feels a blob of salty pain form on the roof of his mouth.

  “Too bad,” Panchaud says, putting his ear-filthed hand on Miles’ shoulder. “I heard she was a fucking rocket.”

  Miles sighs into his panel and knows it’s a mistake.

  “Seaman!?”

  “Aye-aye, sir.”

  “You are addressing a superior officer.”

  Miles rises from his chair to stand at attention. Pictures his mother’s body stiff and bloated, sinking through the sea. “Aye-aye, sir.”

  “As you were.” Panchaud turns and walks away with a smirk in his step.

  On his first break, Miles lies on the rack craving fresh air and staring at his toes where the little one squishes into its neighbour. They’ve basically become one toe and Miles spends an alarming amount of time lathering that gnarled two-headed gorgon with tea tree oil, which is supposed to keep the foot fungus from spreading. The ritual keeps him sane, or soothed. He likes the mild sting in his red, chapped crevices, the burn of menthol lilting into lung. Miles likes to think that his toes are trying to grow into one because of evolution. The same reason he only had one wisdom tooth. Humans don’t need wisdom teeth anymore and we spend all our time walking in shoes so we don’t need pinky toes either. Miles considers himself a man of the future, like Kevin Costner in Waterworld.

  Although he never voiced his opinion after his mother and the rest of the adult world claimed that it was one of the worst films in cinematic history, Miles has always privately cherished Waterworld. Remembers eating Skittles and needing to go to the bathroom but being unable because he was mesmerized by Kevin Costner’s acrobatic skipperage aboard his modified catamaran. Miles was enthralled by the Smokers with their motorized derring-do, by Dennis Hopper’s gas-guzzling piratical mania, by the giant mutant fish spawned by chemicals or nuclear testing. It was 1995 and this was the first time, as far as he could remember, that Miles had seriously imagined the future of molten ice caps. But what he loved most was the idea of a man’s neck opening into gills. A gilled man swimming deep under water, finding a human city. A city submerged, abandoned to the gnaw of salt and water and time. No windows or walls, just the gridded frames of algae-frilled buildings. How Miles longed then, to become like the Mariner. To grow gills of his own. To swim unencumbered towards the bottom of the sea.