Peninsula Sinking

by David Huebert

  Ten days underway and Miles is taking his first shower when Panchaud thumps in, stomach swelling from a recent blitz of crunches. This is bad because Miles is not showering in the shower, which is tiny and fiercely contested and next to the toilets with their reek of sepsis and sanitizer. Instead, Miles is showering in the engine room. Showering with the drain hose from the emergency drinking water tank, which is nicely warm because the diesel is running. Miles is certainly not the only seaman who showers here on occasion, but still it’s not good to get caught.

  “Seaman!” Panchaud roars over the echo of the diesel.

  “Aye-aye, sir!” Miles barks back, dropping the hose to stand at attention. Standing wet and naked in front of a fully dressed officer. Crossing his hands in front of his genitals.

  “Do you realize you are currently bathing with the HMCS Atlantis’ reserve drinking water rations and that in time of extremity these reserve supplies could save the life of every seaman on board yourself included?”

  “Aye-aye sir!” Stretching to turn off the faucet while trying to remain as close to attention as possible.

  “Then why have you chosen to breach protocol and use emergency military water supply for personal bathing?”

  The water cooling on his naked body. “Warm water, sir, and cleanliness.”

  “Do you realize you are a total and complete prima donna?”

  “Aye-aye sir!”

  “That you’re lucky I don’t have you court marshalled?”

  “Aye-aye sir!”

  “That you’re lucky I don’t make you walk naked out into the mess hall and show everyone your shrivelled little sea cucumber?”

  “Aye-aye sir!”

  Panchaud looks down at Miles’ feet. Stares for a long time at the red and white marble of fungus and the two gnarly toes gooing together. “Merde,” he mutters, leaving Miles naked with the diesel roaring off the engine room walls. “Taber fucking nacle.”

  On a submarine there is no privacy, which means no sex. At least no detectable sex. Not even solo. One shower for fifty-nine people and time in there is strictly regulated and Miles always feels like there might be someone listening. Someone sensing a change in the rhythm of the water splashing against the drain. There’s talk of homosexual encounters and there are plenty of military sexual assaults but aside from a few guys flipping through porn mags Miles has never seen much evidence of desire.

  Mostly he sees deflation. Libidos sublimated into endless crunches, twisted into the mirror-bright polish of the control room floor. Men sagging like the string they tie between racks. String that starts taut at the surface and gradually slackens as the Atlantis travels deeper and deeper. A hundred metres, two hundred, three. Mostly Miles sees submariners growing paler and paler until he’s sure he can see down through them. Sure that if they took their shirts off he would see their stuttering hearts.

  Submarines are one of the few places left with no WiFi, which is both nice and not nice. It’s not nice because it means he can’t contact anyone up top. Not his street hockey buddies or his surfing buddies or the old Nazi. It’s nice because it means Miles spends most of his free time below with books. But he only has room for one or two so he spends most of his free time on this voyage reading about whale song. Often he begins by reading and ends up just lying there, thinking. Thinking about the whales riding curious in the baffles of the Atlantis, calling and calling and wondering why this strange creature with the boxy dorsal won’t answer. Or thinking about people. Thinking about his dad, picturing the old Nazi sitting in his office wearing jackboots and chewing Nicorette while he watches weird retro porn. Thinking about his mother, about Botox.

  Miles wakes in a state of bleary relief when Douglass comes in and shakes him. With his push-broom moustache and pathological knowledge of Doctor Who, Douglass is his closest friend on the boat. Closest friend on the boat not signifying much because Miles likes to maintain an emotional distance.

  But he’s always happy when Douglass tugs him out of sleep because it means biologics. So he staggers up, patting the walls and floors until he finds his uniform. Tripping into his pants as he rushes to catch Douglass on his way up the ladder to the control room.

  Douglass sits down in front of the sonar panel where he’s working the balls to four. An avuncular smile as he hands Miles the headset.

  First a light, high chirping. A skitter fading into warble. Then a tingle and behind it a crooning like a massive, warped bassoon. Long and sweet and low. Curving beyond ends and origins, moving and moving, onward and back, a ribboning nocturne. The trace of sparklers on the retina as their glow vanishes into dark.

  “Do you hear it?” Douglass says after a deep swing of bass.

  Miles nods. “Humpback for sure.”

  “It’s a chorus. Three or four of them doing the same song for the last ninety minutes, overlapping.”

  Miles says there’s one prominent male.

  “Should we say hello?”

  Sometimes submarines send out a ping to whales, and sperms have been known to respond. Miles shakes his head, says they should leave him be. Should do their job and listen.

  “What do you think he’s saying?”

  Miles shrugs, turns his mind back to the wide, warbling croon.

  At the Fleet School in Esquimalt, submariners learn a lot about marine life. They learn how to differentiate the sounds of humpbacks and orcas and pilot whales from the rattle of ships and the purr of potentially hostile submarines. They learn that the American military once affixed cameras to pilot whales and trained them to track Soviet submarine activity. And they learn about whale song. About the syntax of it, the hierarchy of sounds, the variation of themes far more complex than bird song. The eleven populations of humpbacks worldwide each have their own distinct dialect, but they draw from one another—a clear example of cultural transmission. Some researchers say that because whales can sonically send and receive twenty times as much information as humans, they rival or better us in intelligence. But Miles doesn’t like to think like that, to measure human against cetacean. Miles prefers to think that whales don’t differentiate between song and language, don’t distinguish between sense and sound. That for them meaning and beauty are one and the same.

  “I think he’s lonely,” Douglass says. “He’s lonely and he’s looking for a mate. Looking for connection.”

  “Of course he is,” Miles says. Says it and means it and bends his mind into the hydrophone, listening to that massive creature warbling out his spectacular solitude. “I hear you,” Miles whispers, not much caring whether Douglass catches it. “I hear you.”

  What mostly happens on ship is nothing. What mostly happens is fifty-four men and five women in identical blue shirts sucking each other’s precious oxygen. What mostly happens is a boredom so colossal that cleaning the ship every seven days feels like a festival. What mostly happens is thin air and seamen on their off time playing poker and watching Kurt Russell movies over and over and trying not to think about the panel catching fire or the doors bursting in. Trying not to think about the man who died ten years ago after an electrical fire aboard the HMCS Chicoutimi or the fact that eight years later the HMCS Corner Brook struck bottom during training exercises off Vancouver Island. Trying not to think about the K-141 Kursk, the Russian sub that sank in 2000 with 118 hands. Putin and the navy claiming it was a collision but there was no collision. The sub went down on a routine weapon test. The seamen loading dummy torpedoes for testing and one of them went off. An explosion equivalent to a hundred kilos of TNT, rupturing the hull and collapsing three of the sub’s compartments. Four point two on the Richter and picked up on seismographs from Paris to Alaska. Ninety-five men dying instantly but it’s not the dead who compel Miles’ imagination. It is the twenty-three who survived. The twenty-three men plunging under the waist-high water to save themselves from burning to death. Staying under and staying under but final
ly needing to come up to breathe. Finding not air but fire and smoke. The boat filling and filling then sinking, drifting through its lethargic last descent before finally settling on the shelf of the Barents Sea.

  What mostly happens on ship is brooding along at sixty metres below, rotating the sonar ears and listening for the purr of hostile submarines. Miles spends his hours fighting fatigue and listening for hostiles and watching the sonograph sketch its jagged landscapes, the range circles opening like perfect round mouths before disappearing, green ghosts rising in their wake.

  What sometimes happens is snorting. What happens every twenty-four hours is rising up to periscope depth so the ship, pseudo-whale that it is, can take oxygen. Coming up to periscope depth and all the seamen feeling the elation of it, their bodies becoming one in this massive high-tensile lung as it inhales the air that sustains them. What happens once a week on calm seas is coming up into the middle of the wide blue so that a few men at a time can stagger out into the open air. Men in dry suits opening the hatch and crawling out into the sunlight or the fierce slapping chill, feeling like insects skittering about a husk of driftwood. Grinning and sun-dazed as the swells rise and splash against the slick curvature of the vessel. Not saying anything but all of them feeling the vulnerability. The precariousness of standing in a place where an unruly wave might snatch them and the smallest collision could send them sliding into a frigid indifference of black.

  Afterwards, sitting around the panel extra tired from the exposure to wind and sun, from the shock of standing out there in the full oxygen and feeling the depletion, now, more than ever. Wanting to rest the eyes just a little while staring at the control room’s blinking red and yellow lights. Drinking coffee until the urine comes out thick and yellow and often.

  What happens just once, ten days into this fifteen-week training mission, is testing the torpedoes. Miles and everyone else in the control room prepared to die at any moment as the men in the torpedo room load the bomb. All of them studied the Kursk case in training and what else is there to think of now? Something in the dark depths of the mind twitching to run, something primitive unable to compute the fact that there is nowhere to go. Eyes keen on the monitors and men chewing their knuckles and waiting. Waiting dreadful as the captain checks in with the master-at-arms, who says the missile is loaded. Picturing that twenty-foot-long half-ton warhead sitting in its torpedo tube and then the captain gives the order to fire and it’s probably nerves but Miles gets a feeling like the whole boat is rocking, gasping.

  What happens in one brief and terrible moment is blasting a missile that cost the Canadian military one million dollars into the hull of a decommissioned American freighter. Watching on screen as the torpedo approaches.

  “Two seconds to contact.”

  “One second.”

  Heat smears across the radar. Heat billows and dissipates. All the submariners cheering and high fiving as the ship buckles. That rusted ocean-going city bending and opening at the flank. The ship listing, listing sidelong. Slowly taking in water and beginning to descend.

  A cheer as the captain announces: “Target neutralized.” The ridiculousness of neutralizing a target with no crew or weapons but all the submariners nonetheless rapt as they watch the blips move lower. Checking the screens and Panchaud calling out numbers as the freighter fully submerges, enters the world below. Almost an hour before it finally settles on the floor of the Mid-Ocean Canyon.

  A triumph. A million dollars spent to make sure our subs could take out a warship if needed and now this fractured hulk of iron sits at the bottom of the Atlantic, its side shredded open like a nightmare mouth. Off-duty seamen already hitting the rack or turning on Total Recall again and Miles finds himself thinking of what might grow in that hulking wreckage. Thinking about whales. How when they die their massive bodies turn to ecosystems, what scientists call a “whale fall.” Those enormous bodies becoming habitats where isopods, sea cucumbers, hagfish, and lobsters sustain themselves for decades.

  Miles and Douglass sit in the torpedo room drinking cheap scotch from a six-ounce plastic vial, Miles wondering why Douglass would risk a court martial for a whiskey this coarse. Nonetheless he drinks and enjoys the sear of the awful blended whiskey and the quick buzz it gives in the thin air. When you’re underway there’s technically no booze but there is also, quite regularly, booze. So they drink from a plastic vial staring at the warheads in their aluminum cases and Douglass asks Miles what he does up top, for fun. Miles considers a lie about fly fishing but instead he tells the truth: surf at Lawrencetown four times a year, a floor hockey league, occasional Tinder dates, a lot of reading.

  As if he hadn’t heard right: “Reading?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Like fiction?”

  “Not so much. A lot of ecological stuff. Suzuki. E.O. Wilson. Naomi Klein.”

  Douglass says “oh” and looks at Miles like “are you hatching to snip some wires in the diesel room?” So Miles does not tell Douglass that if he could do things over, do things without several years of ski bumming then beach bumming, without multiple false starts at university and a stupidity of debt, he’d become a conservation biologist. Give less of a fuck about the shadow of his father and travel out on a sailboat studying the effects of river pollution on migration patterns.

  Douglass keeps staring awkwardly into his little vial of whiskey so Miles does not mention that he thinks a lot about megastorms and rising sea levels and massive-scale extinction but he finds that a bit morbid so he also tries to think about life. The new life that might bloom in a warming world. Miles does not say how he once read that millions of years ago there were palm trees on Antarctica, how he often imagines palm trees at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. Palm trees with faces. Neon palm trees smiling to each other. Smiling and swaying in the tickle of the gulf stream, totally safe from the storms raging on the surface.

  “Did you ever hear about the Barracuda?” Douglass asks and even though he has heard about it Miles shakes his head. Shakes his head because he’s happy to sit there and listen to Douglass talk about the secret American nuclear sub that went AWOL in the eighties. The nuclear sub with a shark’s mouth painted on the bow that has been spotted by divers and pilot whale cameras and shows up on someone’s radar every couple of years only to disappear on the next pulse of microwaves. Some people say that the Soviets captured it in eighty-eight and have been keeping the men hostage for three decades, allowing them to surface every few months for fuel and supplies. Others say the vessel just keeps travelling on its own accord, that it got caught in a strange magnetic current and keeps circulating, now, long after all the men have withered into skeletons. An iron sepulchre drifting with the earth’s steady swirl.

  “You know what I think?” Douglass says. “I think something else is driving it. Something we haven’t seen before. Something super-intelligent living way down in the midnight zone. Something very smart and very patient. Something biding its time.”

  Miles smiles, takes another corrosive swill. “Sounds like a bad episode of Doctor Who,” he says, thinking that in fact Douglass’ hypothesis might be the loveliest thing he’s ever heard.

  Panchaud shakes Miles awake and tells him to come down to the mess. Panchaud’s got Douglass and Bull and George out in the hall already and they walk stooped and sheepish, trading glances. Three quarters of the ship snuggled into the dining quarters and the captain notably absent. Everyone gathered around Burgess who sashays tenderly as he lathers his bloated bare gut with margarine. Hair sprouting from his nipples like furry black teardrops and a pentagram of Cool Whip zazzed across his chest. The crew hooting and whistling and Miles realizing far too late that this is the Polar Ceremony. That he and the three other new seamen are entering the Arctic Circle for the first time which means getting Polarized and no way out.

  First: buckets of ice. Everyone hooting and wooing and Panchaud shouting that there is a treat at the bottom of
the bucket but they have to fish it out with their mouths and the last one gets the “Surprise Polaire.”

  So Miles, Douglass, Bull, and George on all fours digging their heads into half-melted buckets of ice. Miles’ scalp and ears singing frigid in the wash and Miles feels like screaming. Feels like howling out that he is a thirty-year-old man not a high-school freshman in Dazed and Confused but instead he sees suddenly how a person accepts something this inane. Accepts it simply because they want to not make it worse.

  Miles’ teeth clamp a sardine and he rises up from his bucket amidst cheers and back pats, sees that Douglass is the only seaman with his face still submerged. Sees Panchaud grab Douglass’ collar and haul him up, a sneer in his eyes.

  Panchaud tells Douglass to get on all fours and he does. Everyone crowded in the mess starting to chant as Panchaud climbs onto Douglass’ back, one hand raised to swing a virtual lasso. Burgess lies down on his back, garishly stroking his stomach as Panchaud rides Douglass about the hall. Everyone shouting “Lick! Lick! Lick!” and “Surprise Polaire!” so Douglass bends and tongues the whipped cream off Burgess’ swarthy breast, his push-broom moustache turning into a cloud of lather. Panchaud grinning darkly and shaking his steed. Leaning over and hissing audibly into Douglass’ ear: “Every last drop.”