by John Hersey
Tom was sharply conscious of two dangers—not that he feared them, exactly, for out here all that adrenalin could do for a man was being done, and all emotions were being put, like all muscles, to work: the danger of being pooped from astern by one of those rollers breaking along the tops, and the danger of wallowing over so far in one of the troughs as to backfill the exhaust right over its looping water trap and thus to kill the engine.
He thought of trailing a rope from the stern; he had often read about the miraculous effect on following combers of such a tiny thing as a long length of line. But he did not see how he could spare the time or strength—for he was alone now, alone with this storm and that smile—strength both to hold with one hand to the wheel, which despite the evident loss of control by the rudder tugged this way and that with astonishing ferocity, and with the other hand to fetch a line from the lazuret behind him and feed it out astern; too many problems of strength and balance. And in time he observed that in any case each breaker held its place at the top of the wave, and that the great structure of the wave itself never came toppling down.
What had happened to the proportion of things? How insignificant Harmony had become, what a gnat—or louse—Tom was now! Did he think that Audrey and Flick had made him feel small the afternoon before, when he had tapped that look of theirs? Now he was literally next-to-nothing; his heart was no bigger than the tiniest grain of sand, and worth no more. How gross the seascape was! The spray from those breakers astern, when she was half way down a wave, seemed to be leaping over the spreaders more than half way up the mainmast, and when Harmony fell into the out-of-control squirming of her consternation at the foot of one of those troughs and Tom looked up and around, he found her in a bowl of raging water, an amphitheater with steepest galleries, the topmost of which seemed to tower over the windvane at the head of the mast, which he knew to be thirty-eight feet high, and again when, a few seconds later, she trembled at a crest in the froth of a breaker reaching up her flanks with its willful steel fingers deceitfully camouflaged by millions of soft white bubbles, she seemed to be on a pinnacle, an Alp of water capped with snow white, commanding a peak’s panorama if one could overcome his vertigo and look, and yet again, when she started the headlong descent of that mountain and Tom looked ahead and downward, he half expected the sea to part down there at the bottom, to open up all the way down to sand and rocks bearded with glistening kelp and barnacled shells and fishes flapping and gasping on dry land and green lobsters scrambling in terror across the open place seeking the cover of the salt sea. But Tom had begun to distrust his eyes; the borderline between seeming and being was growing vague. That smile of Audrey’s seemed as vast as the gap between two of these hurricane-built seas. Did he exaggerate those waves, that indulgent molding of her lips—or, thinking of himself, of his own heart, did he minimize, cut himself down too far? Time was shot to hell—was space going, too, especially the space filled by the self? His loss of Audrey was beyond belief; was he losing his perception of heights and depths, and of how far it was from wavetop to wavetop, or from fingertip to fingertip, heartbeat to heartbeat? Was he seeing and feeling things all wrong? Had he really lost his wife? Or even his life, in the terms in which he had recognized existence before seeing these seas and that smile? Or his mind? His mind?
Now came an event to test his perceptions. Near the top of one of these gigantic waves a smaller wave climbing the bigger one’s back came charging, with sudden fury, at Harmony, and it slapped her with the brute strength that water possesses in more abundance than any other element, even fire, and Harmony jumped suddenly, bucking so hard in pain and annoyance that the life ring, a canvas-sheathed cork doughnut with the name of the yawl painted on it in blue block letters, burst its marlin lashings and leaped right out of its cloth cradle slung between the mizzen shrouds quite close to where Tom sat, and flipped overboard into the sea. It flashed astern, yanking after it the coiled lifeline that one hoped would be long enough in an emergency—and snaked it clean away. The ring was gone. Tom saw it go. But he was able to tell himself that nothing more than an idea had fallen overboard. A life ring would be meaningless in this water—and that was the very essence of the trouble out here. All the usual meanings of objects, of words, which could no longer be heard anyway, of persons, who could no longer be reached, except perhaps by smiling, of relationships between persons and objects and, alas, between persons and persons—all the usual meanings were distorted here. The apparent distortions of time and of scale had made all that should seem familiar seem, to the contrary, unreal, senseless, broken down, moribund, totally gone to pieces.
At the crest of a wave Tom had a vision of his telling a lie to Audrey. This had happened; or at least he believed it had happened. It had been such a stupid, bizarre, pointless, ridiculous lie. He had come home late. He had in fact been at the hospital; a man named Smallens, who, knowing he should not, had eaten in a restaurant in Jersey some clams that must have had their beds in a boardinghouse of ordure at the gate of a suburban sewer, because the man’s liver at once became an inferno, had detained him with endless arguments—on top of everything else the man was a lawyer—about the treatment Tom had prescribed for him. This had put Tom in a crazy mood, and when he got home to a spoiled supper and four tight guests he told Audrey that he had had to have a long consultation with a lawyer because some nutty girl whom he had examined several months before in the presence of Miss Slattery had now slapped a paternity suit on him, alleging that he had, as she put it in her complaint, “molested her” on the examining table. What ever made him tell such a story was beyond him at the time—unless it had to do with some suppressed impulses with respect to female patients which he had never clearly admitted to himself; he had had to go through weeks of subsequent elaborations of the basic lie—settling the mess out of court, keeping the scandal from getting in the papers, steadying the nerves of the lawyer who was overly fearful for Dr. Medlar’s reputation. He saw himself now, beckoning Audrey out of the living room and along the hall to the bedroom, whispering the story to her so the guests would not hear it—and now in the hurricane he was suddenly caught by a grotesque gap in the memory. He could not remember whether the Hamdens were guests that evening. Maybe—he recalled Dottie lying in her bikini on the sun-heated cushions, and how close he had come to a reckless theft—the lie had been the truth. It was he who had been unfaithful to Audrey, not the other way around…Down Harmony plunged on a dizzy descent.
The whole world had become one great eye-fooler, and suddenly a large number of things—opposites that had dissolved into each other, paradoxes, lies that were truths, troughs that were crests, wests that were easts—struck him as funny, and he began to laugh. What was humor but a sense of the incongruous, and what was this storm at play with Harmony but a counter-clockwise turmoil of incongruities? He threw back his head and roared at the big joke of Esmé and what it was doing to his beliefs and perceptions; the howler of Dottie and Flick and Audrey and the self, lovers and betrayers, out for a happy cruise in this storm. It was rich! Tom’s ribs began to ache with the joy of the joke.
But then he saw Audrey looking at him. It was clear that she could not hear his guffaws, for he could not even hear them himself in the crash of rain on his hood and the rush of the breakers and the moaning of the rigging and that baritone thrumming from down in the caverns of the sea, but she could see all too well the eruptions of the laughter at his mouth; and she looked horrified. Her smile had been quick-frozen, and her eyes were full of suspicion. It was as if she, too, had suddenly come to realize that the paternity-suit lie was an everlasting truth.
Which brought them, on a theme of lack of faith, around to Flick—and for Tom this intensified the joke. Flick was a lump. Flick just sat there and stared off to whatever offered itself as being the view to starboard. Dottie reached up and caressed the hair out of his eyes, and the sight of this gesture thawed the eternal smile on Audrey’s lips; yes, the women would take care of him.
It had turned out that this man who celebrated communication in all its most sophisticated forms had fallen into a profound silence, where he appeared to be utterly unreachable. All that waving of his arms, all that shouting and singing, which had looked so much like the ecstasy of a man throwing himself at life, taking delight in the tests of manhood—all that had proved to be some kind of ceremony of removal. It had been addressed to no one, not even to the bitch Esmé. Now in this festival of incongruities which Esmé was, it struck Tom that it was precisely Flick’s impulse toward human silence that had made him become, in the first place, a technician of mechanical communication. All his devices would lead in the end to a deaf, dumb, and blind earth; a desire for withdrawal, for separateness, for isolation, was at the root of his choice of a career devoted to soldered connections, circuitry, electronic computation, wiring, waves of energy reaching out into space and bearing coded messages. In medical school Tom had used to play a game of predicting students’ specialties—this man, with a childlike sweetness and deep nostalgia, bound to be a pediatrician; this one, powerful and subtly cruel, a surgeon; this one, a tiny bit sneaky where girls were concerned, a gynecologist. One could have known that Flick would choose to be a computer man of some sort, for what he really wanted was a vast network of silence. And now he was caught in it. In the height of the hurricane he was serenely moored in port. He was a lump. Let the smiler have him. He was inert; he would be a heavy weight on her hands, if not on her conscience.
She had trained that smile on Flick now. She was going to take care of him. Yes, she really was: She was unsnapping her safety hook, and darting one look at the enormous seas she slipped to her knees on the cockpit deck and eased herself across the way and threw her arms around Flick’s legs and pulled herself up on him and sat beside him—between him and Dottie. She snapped herself into that intervening place. With one hand on the coaming she used the other to turn Flick’s head around toward her, and she beamed her smile into his face, and then she began a series of hand signals which Flick, with eyes that seemed to have scales over them, did not in the least comprehend, or even watch and follow. What was she trying to tell him? Tom, who was having to keep an eye on the swooping of Harmony down into the gaping hollows of water, could not make it out himself. Suddenly Audrey was standing over Flick, and she reached under his armpits, and she was lifting him, or trying to persuade him to rise. He did stand up, looking extremely dull, and Audrey hauled him toward the opposite side of the cockpit. What, Tom wondered, was this ploy—merely taking him away from Dottie?
Ah, delicious! This was in the true spirit of Esmé: She had unsnapped her safety belt but not his! She was tugging; he was anchored. They waltzed in mid-cockpit, hanging there from his harness like some grotesque him-and-her puppet.
Dottie saw the difficulty, but not, for some reason, the humor of it, and she leaned forward and unsnapped her husband.
Audrey and Flick fell in each other’s arms into the seat on the port side.
Audrey attached the lump to the lifelines, and, his lips blue, downcast, shivering, holding on tight, he began at once to stare off to port. She left him then, crossed the cockpit on her knees again, raised the seat cover from a kneeling position, and—oh, God, this storm was confusing—began to pump.
Tom felt a flash of triumph; then he felt a spurt of guilt; and then, flooded by a realization that in this storm of opposites and paradoxes both feelings were fatuously inappropriate, he returned, as if homeward, to anger. But fear crept into the anger as he wondered what its object was. What could he be angry at? At last he picked, of all targets, the most foolish: the storm. He was furious at its persistence, he raged at its strength.
Grinding, he zeroed in on his loneliness and began in his anger to wonder what it was. His wife was no longer his; his friend was no longer his; goose pimples had prevented him from making Dottie his. Nobody was his. Was it then simply the non-functioning of the third-person masculine possessive pronoun that defined his loneliness? Was it a matter of having lost equity in certain properties which were incidentally human? Was there any difference between Flick’s isolation of silence and staring, and his, of having been dispossessed? Audrey had stopped pumping—was Harmony dry? He could not tell. She had stopped. She was smiling at him again; it was precisely the same smile as she had lavished on the lump; it was the badge of her loneliness. Did she have an intention of coming over and lifting him, her husband, by the armpits and transplanting him in the cockpit so she could do what?—get in the driver’s seat? He would knock her down if she tried it; he would belt her. She was no longer his, and he was damned if he would let her even try to make him hers.
Then he knew why he was angry at the storm: Within its confusion all the assumptions of “this world,” all its values, all its pretenses, all its civilization—all had turned out to be false here, useless here, ludicrous, dishonorable, hypocritical, “nice,” and essentially unreal. Here the thrumming descent to the trough was a descent to the id. He would give Audrey a big poke in the chops if she started that armpit gambit. And yet—and here were the very liver and lights of his rage—he wanted to bring Harmony through. To what? Surely not just to the eye of the storm. To what beyond, to what? How could there be an end to this loneliness? Toward what was he steering? That was the mystery of mysteries—the enigma of his desire for life.
This desire was, even now, very strong. He felt it in his shoulders, spinning the wheel to try to offset, by anticipating it, that sickening skid at the foot of the trough. He was too late! The rudder was out of the water. He could feel the deck beneath him begin to rise and seem to twist. Seeming! What was the difference between seeming and being? His craft was out of his control and out of her own. She could not decide which way to skid and roll. She was twisting her back. This must surely be the last plunge. This time she would dig her nose into the water ahead and with her enormous impetus she would drive down into it, scooping, burrowing, and she would simply turn turtle. A sea somersault. The masts would point downward, the glistening green keel would reach toward the sky.
How powerful, at this moment, in his head and chest and guts and loins, was that unaccountable desire! Life! Buoyancy! A refusal to go under! He stood up at the wheel. He could see that Harmony—brave Harmony!—had the same desire as he. By God, she did! Green water curled at the cheeks, the bowsprit had plunged like a swordfish’s weapon into the flank of the foe, the prow was on the verge of plunging under and wore a mean collar of flying foam. Every influence of the hurricane was driving her in and down, to burial, but she fought on the very edge of it; she trembled and hummed. Her head was still up. Tom felt a slight tug at the rudder. He threw it, not knowing which way to commit his influence, to port. That way, if she answered, the exhaust would be pointing downward (a detail! details added up to the life force!) and the engine would be safe. For a long time she shuddered and thrummed, her bowsprit wholly covered.
The first sign was an end to the thrumming, and he realized: it was the keel. The keel had taken hold, and the scooping rudder. Harmony shook her head. Before she turned she began to roll, and now Tom saw that the danger was that she would roll right over on her side. Yes, that was it: sidewise rather than head over heels. She began to sheer away from the solid mass of water ahead. Her masts, driven by both wind and the centrifugal impulse of the great skid into which she was now surely swooping, plunged toward the horizontal. Hoo-o-o-o! What a surge! Over, over. Here came the sea into the cockpit. Poor Dottie was alone on the lower side; Tom, falling, saw her put her head down, and she disappeared. Then Tom was under water, somewhere near the wheel; he had a hand on a spoke. And in that spoke he felt something. A trembling, a trying. Yes, yes! His head came up. He was in a soaked heap on the cockpit deck. The cockpit was full. The masts were drawing big, slow, upward arcs on the sky. Dottie was beside him in the flooded cockpit, shoulder-deep, with eyes like painted saucers. And there were Flick and Audrey, still on the higher seat. She was smiling; he was sta
ring; the world was right side up.
And Harmony was going ahead up a riffled hill of grayish green. Slowly the water began to drain from the cockpit. Thank God, the cabin hatches were not stove in. The tachometer came awash; the engine was steady!
Tom knew she could not run before it any more; that had been too close. Indeed he clearly knew now, with salt water nearly up to his knees, that he should have turned long since. Opposites! The desire for life, the persistence in dangerous error. How could he have held a wrong course, running before the wind and waves, so long? Had it really been necessary to keep moving out and out, away from shelter, toward the eye of the storm? Yet here they were, here they still were.
He put the wheel way down to port and began the overdue turn.
He and his yawl were shot full of luck; that was all he could think as, amid powers immeasurably greater than that of the tiny tab of tapered oak hinged to the rudder post, or of his weary hand wrapped around a thin spindle of mahogany, chance rather than judgment on his part chose just the right phase of a huge swell for her to swing on, so she was in the vulnerable position, wind abeam, on the rise of the great hump, and by the time the crest came, with its curling and breaking comber, she was well up into the teeth of the blow.
That was all very well: she had turned. But coming round to face the wind brought, besides the breath-stealing fact of facing the wind, a new revelation with a new shock on its back. This was not going to be any better than going down wind. Indeed, he saw that he had sustained a new and frightful loss: There was no longer any such thing, out here, as relativity. The concepts “better” and “worse” had lost their meaning; faster and slower, bigger and smaller, more direct and more devious, and better and worse and worse and better—all gone. Here there was only one medium, driven wetness; one temper, rage; one condition of life, danger of a uniform density.