Tremble

by Tobsha Learner

  “What is your name?” The young stranger’s voice is more mature than Clive had imagined. He waits for a moment before answering.

  “Clive,” he says softly. “Clive.”

  He woke.

  “Scarsgard, look sharp!” his commanding officer barked in his ear. For a second he lay there trying to remember where he was and who he was. The dream came flooding back, and, terrified that he might have a telltale semen stain down his trousers, he sat up. The CO pressed his rifle into his hand. “Get the fuck up. We attack in ten.”

  The moving shadows of the other men fell across the canvas as Clive checked his clothes. He had come. He cleaned himself up with a tissue, thanking God that the standard-issue parka was a dark wool, then stepped out into the chilly dawn.

  Juan woke up with a crick in his neck and cramped limbs. He’d been curled against the wall. How long he’d been asleep he wasn’t sure. But he had had the strangest dream. A dream of desire. A phantasm, a warning that he must stop the hypocrisy of his existence or else he wouldn’t survive. Not whole. Not as a complete man. The dream had been so vivid he could almost taste the semen at the back of his throat.

  After checking his comrades weren’t looking he cautiously ran a hand down the front of his pants. He was wet. He had come. Jesus, in the middle of a war, in the middle of a battlefield, he thought, wondering whether to do such a thing was disrespectful to the dead. He crossed himself just in case, then realized his bladder was bursting.

  “Look who’s risen from the grave,” joked Gustavo.

  “Anything happening out there?” Juan gazed bleakly at the stretch of scrubland; beyond, the sea was a dull gray streak on the horizon.

  “Nothing, not even a vulture. Hopefully they’ve all run home to their queen.”

  Juan stretched, then, hoisting his rifle over his shoulder, walked to the back of the trench, to the wall facing away from the front line.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To piss. Think you can hold the fort without me?”

  “No problem! Watch out for snakes.”

  Juan stepped out of the dugout and, after glancing around, cautiously walked a few steps away and, his back to the trench, began to urinate.

  Clive dropped to a crouching position, the other three soldiers fanning out beside him. All of them had sighted the gun post at the same moment—an ordinary-looking bank of mud almost indistinguishable from the surrounding scrubland, except for the tiny black ring of a machine-gun nozzle staring straight out from a small hole in the mound. The dawn light painted the whole terrain with a rose wash as pink rays began to creep up into the sky. Sunrise just like any other day in any other part of the world, Clive thought, aware that his back teeth had begun to rattle. Excitement? Fear? He peered back at the gun post. He knew that beyond the facade the wall would be open at the top. It was a vulnerability, one he could exploit. Gesturing to the others, he crawled forward on his belly, conscious of the eye of the gun barrel staring out blindly.

  He moved another five feet, the barrel didn’t move. Praying there was no one behind it, he reached down to his belt and unclipped a locked hand grenade. Holding it between his knees, he pulled at the pin with both hands; after several hard tugs it came out. Using his best bowling style he lobbed it into the gun post.

  Juan was just shaking himself dry when the explosion knocked him to the ground. He lay there for a moment as the panorama tilted on its edge then swayed back to horizontal. Then he hauled himself up, dimly aware of a throbbing in his left side. Through a film of blood he saw smoke streaming out of the gun post and heard an eerie screaming coming from within. His comrades. Juan ran, legs pounding against the scrubland, and dived into the flames and smoke.

  One half of the gun post was a smoldering mass of twisted metal fused with human flesh: two of the soldiers were dead. Juan recognized Dario’s torso from the heavy gold chain around his neck, normally hidden under his army vest—the blast had stripped him naked. The screaming came from Gustavo. His body had been thrown against the far wall; he was missing an arm and a leg. He was still clutching his rifle. As Juan approached, the screaming stopped. Juan stared down at his dead friend.

  Clive saw the outline of the man’s head before the man spotted him. He dropped out of sight then, crouching, made his way over the broken wall of the smoldering dugout. The soldier was standing over a corpse; there was something about him that Clive recognized—his stance, the width of his shoulders. Bizarrely he had taken his helmet off, his long black hair fell to his shoulders. Clive could tell that he was handsome, and perhaps it was this and the vulnerability of his naked head that made the paratrooper falter for a second before lifting his rifle to his shoulder. One swift bullet in the back of the head, that’s all, he thought as he peered through the sight then squeezed the trigger. It jammed. Knowing he had no time, Clive jumped on the youth, pushing him down to the ground. Locked together they wrestled in the smoke and burning embers.

  Clive fought against the boy’s weight to raise his bayonet to kill him. The youth twisted around, throwing him onto his back, struggling to reach the long dagger attached to his belt. As he did, the two men finally saw each other’s face.

  Clive recognized him instantly: the full mouth, the scar running from cheek to lip.

  “Clive,” Juan whispered before running his dagger deep within the Englishman’s body. In the same moment Clive’s bayonet came plunging down into Juan’s chest.

  Diver

  I’d never openly describe myself as a recluse, but I guess that’s what most people would call me. The bitter truth of it is that I’m only ever truly comfortable in isolated locations, like the windy stretches of Dartmoor, or Iceland, or the Gobi Desert. I don’t like human beings very much at all. I would have made a fantastic astronaut, except there wasn’t much training for that in the working-class Liverpudlian suburb where I grew up. Instead I was drawn to the docklands and the wild gray Irish Sea; more importantly, to what lies beneath it.

  The first time I dived I immediately knew that I had found my element at last. Don’t get me wrong, it’s just as crowded underwater, but it’s a nonhuman, tremulous, shimmering busyness that defies time and place and the pettiness of our own primate species. There’s the well of darkness beneath you, the horizon of light above, and the orb—a cascading blue as you descend to nowhere and everywhere. I loved it from the very first: the way the suit wraps around you like an amniotic sac, the pressure demarcating your every move in syrupy-slow responsibility. But before I go any further, I’d better introduce myself.

  My name is Seamus O’Connor and at the time of this whispered confession I am thirty-two years old, six foot two, and of not bad complexion. I have my father’s thick black bog-Irish hair, which I sometimes wear in a ponytail, and my ma’s brown eyes. And I’d been divorced six months by the time I found myself on oil rig 2564.

  It was a colossal dinosaur of a thing, built back in the early 1970s during the time of the North Sea oil boom. The oil company that owned it had been making a tidy profit ever since. Oil rigs are manned twenty-four hours of the day, each man working six hours on, six hours off. As diving engineer my job was the underwater maintenance of the massive concrete pylons; two of them driven into the seabed at the shallower end, two of them floating, held by pins. I checked for fallen pipes, cracks in the coring, and any other potential problems. It was a dangerous job that involved spending three days in a decompression chamber after the dive and the heavy accountability for the souls of four other divers beneath me in rank.

  The rest of the time was spent above water: playing cards, exercising, watching porn, helping with mechanical operations, and reading. A twenty-four-hour operation, come sun, rain, or tempest. One week the night shift, a howling gothic world where you battled the wind from cabin to cabin; the next week the day shift, a relentless stream of endless light, with no time between the two to adjust your body clock. Three months on the rig, three months off. But they paid you like a millionaire for putting up
with the isolation and a yawning tedium that would transform the sanest man. And I had fought hard to get my industrial diving rating.

  I was there to forget. My wife had run off with my best and only friend, Hanif, back in Liverpool. I married Meredith when I was in my early twenties. It wasn’t a whirlwind romance but a calculated relationship. Even then I knew that if I didn’t marry I’d end up calcified in my own misanthropy and Meredith, not much more than a girl, mistook my cynicism for intellectual sophistication.

  In those days I liked to delude myself that my attitude was poetic; now I see it as downright selfish. I wish I’d loved Meredith better, and I wish that Hanif had loved me more, but my wife was beautiful and in need and Hanif had a Middle Eastern pragmatism I had always lacked. He made sure he was there when I was not.

  Strangely enough, my anger wasn’t directed toward them but at myself. I guess that’s why I signed on for the gig in the first place. A year to stew in my guilt and abandonment. How many evenings I wasted on that oil rig, lying on my bunk, listening to the rig creak, turning over the last days of my marriage, looking for a telltale fault line that I might have addressed—the only conclusion I ever reached was amazement that they hadn’t run off together sooner. I had not been an easy person to live with, just as I knew I was not an easy person to work with.

  “Eh, Seamus! You coming with us on the dip-the-wick excursion?” Jimmy, the rig’s chief maintenance officer, a short cockney with an even shorter temper, stuck his head into the room. The men, all twenty of them, visited the nearest brothel on the last Thursday of every month. It was a ritual; those men attended the whorehouse like they were going to church, I’m telling you. I’d been with them once before, and once was enough.

  The brothel, located in the windswept harbor town of Lerwick in the Shetland Islands, was above a fish and chip shop with a red light shining bravely over the door. The smell of cooking grease hung in the air and the five “ladies” who worked there were all fifteen stone or more, hefty Scottish lasses with the vernacular and the hair on their legs to prove it.

  My coworkers tricked me into accompanying them by telling me they were going to see a great floor show. I’ve always liked those clubs because, under the colored lights and mirror balls, the strippers remind me of waving forests of seaweed. Those places were a fantasy underwater palace for me, and many was the time I’d escaped into some dive in old Liverpool town. I’m a watcher not a toucher and the lads knew it.

  But after a hellish helicopter ride through whipping winds, we arrived at the tiny port and there was no show. Instead I found myself staring at the massive thighs of a fifty-year-old named Mary MacDougal who cooed over my thick black hair and the muscles in my arms, then offered to go down on me. I declined politely, saying I would be just as content with half an hour of female conversation, and, after rolling herself a cigarette, Mary was more than happy to oblige. I never found out if she was a fantastic lay but I’ll say this much: those whores of Lerwick have the trick of opening a man up and listening as he spills his heart. Then again, being the only available women for a hundred nautical miles in either direction means they’d get plenty of practice.

  Before I knew it I was telling Mary about the divorce and the terrible loss of my wife and best friend. It was the first time I’d talked to anyone about it and it was comforting and easy for she was a stranger. Now that sex was out of the equation we both relaxed and Mary pulled a bottle of excellent Scotch malt from under the rickety foldout bed.

  “Aye, there’s many a damaged man that ends up on the rig. It has a calling for the masochists among us. But the isolation can destroy a good brain,” she concluded, knocking back the whiskey, her massive breasts straining against her fluorescent pink nylon teddy.

  “I’m no masochist, but I suppose you could say I’m paying some kind of emotional penance. It was my own negligence that lost me my wife, after all,” I answered, joining Mary in a second glass.

  Outside it had begun to snow and I was thankful for the gas fire’s dancing blue flames. Mary belched and smoothed down her greasy hair with the gesture of a coquette half her age.

  “I had a client once, years ago,” she said, “maybe even twenty years. Of course I was a real looker in those days. You wouldn’t be sitting there drinking that whiskey if you’d seen me then. Anyways, he was from the rig too. Real sharp he was and regular with the cash. A wee lad, couldn’t have been more than five foot, but feisty.”

  “And?”

  “Well, one month he didn’t visit, or the next either, and then the next thing I know the insurance company is all over the town asking questions.”

  “Questions?”

  “They’d found him floating in a small raft. Dead he was, with his eyes scratched out. Turned out he’d gone stark raving mad. Tattle, that was his name—Jim Tattle. He had some marital problems, just like you. The sea’s got a voice, she’ll taunt you with your history at the best of times. You should be careful,” she finished, leaning forward dramatically. The sound of the howling wind and the soft patter of snow filled the room.

  I realize now that she was trying to warn me, but at the time it was easy to dismiss the story as the starved imaginings of a town gossip. I should have known better.

  Mary must have said something to the other lads because the next thing I knew they’d dubbed me Seamus the Puritan. Not that I cared. If anything it gave me an excuse to withdraw further into my own company. But that wasn’t good for the job. The men like to have a diving engineer they can trust, not only with their lives but with their personal problems as well.

  I know I’m a cold man, but knowing something doesn’t mean you can change it, and I was painfully aware of how false I sounded when I tried to engage them in talk about their girlfriends or how awkward I looked playing soccer with them on the pitch marked out on the wooden deck. I’m just not a social animal by nature and I have always found it impossible not to be true to myself. Then they decided I was making a moral stand with my voluntary celibacy and they took every opportunity to remind me of it.

  “Eh, Seamus! Are you training for the priesthood or is it that our fine Scottish women aren’t good enough for your bastard Irish loins?”

  “Seamus, I was going to invite you to me cabin to watch the porn film with the other lads, then I remembered that you were dickless.”

  Seamus the puritan went to sea,

  Not a muff-diver he would be,

  Not a leg or tit man either,

  Just worked himself into a dickless fever.

  One day they nailed a used condom on my cabin door. Another time I found a blow-up sex doll hanging in the shower unit. It got worse as the next visit to the brothel drew nearer. I suppose I could have stopped them but in a perverse way I think their ridicule fueled my own sense of martyrdom. I’m a self-righteous bastard at the best of times but give me something to be indignant about and I become impossible. It’s in the blood.

  I became monosyllabic, spending my hours checking my apparatus over and over, as if somehow the decline of my marriage could be reversed by the maintenance of my equipment. I greased the lines, cleaned my masks, pored over my diving tables again and again, replaying all the arguments, all the heartbreak, trying to arrive at a point where I could forgive. Jesus, I missed them both.

  Payday came and most of the crew left for Lerwick. As the clouds swallowed up the faint bee-speck of the helicopter I relaxed for the first time in weeks and began walking around the deck, pacing my territory like a dog.

  It was a wonderful feeling, the purity of solitude swelling my soul like a benediction. It felt fucking great. All I could hear was the screaming sea and the seagulls. Salt drying on my skin.

  Knowing that the skeleton crew were all below, I actually took all my clothes off and whirled around like a demented dervish. The huge gas flame of the rig roaring above me, the struggling sun catching in my hair, painting me with a rare northern heat. And for the first time in six months I felt the terrible grief of the divorce losin
g its grip.

  That evening I decided to eat in the chief engineer’s private office. It was a formal room set high above the control room with a 360-degree view of the ocean. On a clear day, if you squinted, you could just see the tip of Peterhead on the Scottish mainland. It was like being on top of the world, as if you were steering the entire globe through time and space. I loved it up there.

  I got myself a nice piece of local salmon from the massive freezer and some excellent hollandaise sauce the chef prepared regularly and froze. I cooked the fish, then washed it down with some vintage sauvignon blanc I’d sneaked on board. I sat at the oak desk, crystal glass in hand. I felt like a king. Slowly my euphoria leaked away. A king of what? What was there for me back in Liverpool? A phone number I’d be frightened to ring and a house I was being forced to sell.

  As night wrapped itself around the windows I stared out at the blooming stars and tried to think of nothing. Absentmindedly my fingers crept across the desk surface and began to stroke some marks that had been carved into the wood. I peered down at them. Tattle had been scratched out in thick clumsy lettering.

  Suddenly a faint cry made me jerk up my head. I froze; realized it was just the seagulls and the roar of the flame. I relaxed but then there was another shout, this time louder. A man was screaming somewhere out there on the ocean.

  I rushed to one of the windows. Outside, wavering bands of captured light rolled across the sea like a drowning sunset but it was an empty shimmering. There was no one to be seen. Then the distant but unmistakable sound of a voice crying, “Help me! Help me!” floated across the water.