The Rope Eater

by Ben Jones

  Outside, we roped up and moved off into the darkness. In the hours of suffering that followed I have only sensation to guide me. Dull thumpings at great distance as I fell and struck my knee, my hand, my face—the tremendous effort of lifting a foot once, and then again—the detached observation that we must be moving very slowly—the sickening bend of black sea ice under my weight—the tugging of the rope at my waist—a surge as my senses rushed back and I found myself trudging still, still in darkness, still cold.

  I have no memory of reaching the ship, though obviously we did. I was told that I had violent strabismus as I came aboard, my eyes rolling like marbles in my sockets, and that Architeuthis had been essentially dragging me along. I slept for more than ten hours—and had to be restrained in my bunk because I kept rising and walking in circles. I am told that I raved for hours before settling into sleep; I was fed and slept again. The doctor slept an hour, ate, and went back out in the storm with Reinhold and Pago to bring back the others. By the time they found the bags, the storm had lifted and the temperature had fallen. They put Creely on a small sledge and hauled him back. They did not bother to look for the boat in the jostle of the pack. Preston was able to make it back under his own power, though he slept the same raving sleep that I had. When we awoke, we were both weak, but coherent. My eyes still wandered some, but otherwise we were ourselves again. We gorged and slept and gorged again, calling to Hunt from our bunks for more food.

  One of my hands blistered badly from the frost, and I was weak for several days. Aziz emerged from the boiler room to nurse me himself; he made me special teas from packets he kept hidden in his loose sleeves. He said little, and did not converse with the other crewmen, but was always there when I awoke, silently proffering a steaming mug of tea or a weak hoosh. Even when I awoke in the middle of the night, he would be sitting nearby, and smile and offer up a mug. As I recovered my strength, he retreated below and I could not prevail upon him to reascend.

  Creely was insensible for two days, but slowly recovered. Only the doctor seemed to have escaped unharmed. The captain took a turn at nursing each of us in his stiff way, but he took a special interest in Creely, as he had been so badly hurt. Creely stayed in bed a few days, but soon dragged himself out and was back on the watch before I was. I was standing in the deckhouse with Griffin on my first day back and I saw him look out at Creely and shake his head in wonder.

  “You couldn’t kill that man with an axe,” he said softly.

  The other expeditions had had very different experiences. Reinhold and Ash had had good weather to the north, and had gone over 120 miles. The dogs had performed beautifully. They returned to the ship with all of their supplies and a full set of samples.

  As I was recovering, Adney perched on my bunk to tell me about their foray.

  “On our ninth day, we were still moving through mostly open water between large floes when the captain spotted walrus in the distance. We made for them as quickly as we could, but they had disappeared by the time we got close. We spent several minutes nosing around looking for them, with Hume telling us what a set of lazy grandmothers we are, when suddenly there was a terrific crash and the bottom of the boat starts to splinter. This walrus pops up beside the boat, his eyes all glazed over. He hooks his tusks over the gunnel, lets out this tremendous bellow, and tears a chunk out of the side of our boat, oak siding and all. The king had been standing, of course, and he catapulted into the water. He hadn’t even wet his ears when he started squalling like a baby—he’s a natural tenor—and thrashing around. We being a little busy with the boat, which was a little busy sinking, didn’t get right to him. Instead we rowed over to a floe and unloaded our gear before we lost it. If you could have heard him—cursing blue and screaming about the walrus attacking. He thrashes over toward us and Pago reaches into the water, pulls him out like a herring, and tosses him onto the floe. As soon as he gets his breath back, he starts working his way around letting each of us have it. I was hoping Pago’d throw him back.

  “So there he is on the ice, when the walrus comes back—not just swims up lazily, but bursts out of the water and lands on the floe bellowing and charging at us. Pago’s got the rifle out and he starts firing, but the walrus doesn’t even slow down. Four, five, six shots before he rears up, and two more before he stops. Myself, I was rooting for the walrus.

  “Anyhow, Pago drops him about four feet away from us and there is Hume curled up in a ball and blubbering—I mean tears rolling down his face. It was too much.”

  He pulled out a dirty yellow tusk, which was longer than my arm and wickedly curved. Its surface was scored with long, deep grooves.

  “Nasty piece of work,” I said.

  “How he got to be an officer is a mystery to us all.”

  “Was it rabid?” I asked.

  “Griffin said there are rogue walruses that develop a taste for meat and they’ll go after anything—other walrus, seal, fish, men, even a polar bear if they can catch one in the water. I’ll never forget his face over the side of the gunnel—pure rage. He was trying to tear the boat apart.

  “So we took our samples and turned back. Without the boat, it took us fourteen days to get back—floe hopping and paddling mostly. Fortunately, Hume’s dunking didn’t stall him for long— spent the afternoon polishing his poor burnished trumpet and went right on blowing. Closer to the ship the ice thickened and the going was pretty easy.”

  I recounted for him the whiteout, Preston’s illness, Creely’s accident, and the sprint over the lead. His eyes grew large as I described the destruction of the tent and the march back. When I finished, he clapped me on the back.

  “Kane, you are a certified Arctic explorer of the first rank. I wish I had been along.”

  “It wasn’t especially heroic,” I said drowsily, “just one foot and the next and trying not to think about how much your feet hurt.”

  “That’s all it is,” he said grandly.

  I was dropping off to sleep again when Reinhold burst in.

  “Hume—he’s dead!” he said excitedly.

  “What?” said Adney. “How?”

  “Don’t know—he just keeled over on the watch. He was dead by the time I reached him.”

  “What did the doc say?”

  “He doesn’t know—nobody knows anything. Nobody knows anything.”

  ten

  Hume had appeared perfectly normal during the days back from the trip—grousing around the deck as usual. He showed no symptoms prior to his collapse and no clues afterward—just a pale, shrunken body swaddled in a patchwork of dark furs. Captain Griffin came forward to wrap him in sailcloth and gently close his eyes. He lay under the flat gray of a twilit afternoon sky on a deck that appeared, if anything, excessively ordinary and undistinguished. Even the dogs were listless. Still, an excited chatter broke out among us as we speculated. Griffin silenced us with a wave of his hand.

  “Leave him his dignity at least, that you may have some yourselves when you come to die,” he said gruffly. “Pago, help me wrap him. Sew the end shut with some pig iron in it, and I’ll get my Bible for a service. No sense in keeping him waiting.”

  As they wrapped Hume in his coarse cerements, I slipped below to tell Aziz what had happened. I had been down for only a minute when I heard the door of the doctor’s cabin slam shut. Aziz and I piled up some cases, and I clambered up and put my ear to the ceiling. From through the boards I could hear the shrill voice of the captain shouting.

  “An outrage! It is an outrage! What did you intend exactly? To burn him up in pieces and measure the heat?”

  “Captain, I do not understand,” answered the smooth voice of the doctor. “We must know why he died. Surely a simple autopsy is not—”

  “We do not need to know. We know he is dead—that is enough—we do not need to butcher him. His body could not take the shock of the sea; he was never especially hardy for a sailor. Suppress your ghoulish curiosity, sir, and let us bury him in his sailor’s grave.”

  �
��Honestly, Captain, you confound me—it is common sense when a healthy man dies for no reason and with no warning to attempt to plumb the cause, if for no other reason than the safety of the other men.”

  “The other men are perfectly safe. Now return the body so that we may have a service.”

  “A simple autopsy will be the matter of a day. He has plenty of time. Have your dinner, Captain, and I will return him to you ready for your ceremony.”

  “You will not. Your autopsy would reveal nothing. It is not worth the harm to his dignity to let you cut him into pieces and weigh and measure him for nothing.”

  The doctor snorted.

  “It is not for nothing—I will discover if he had a sickness that perhaps the others may already have or if our food is tainted or there is poison in the water.”

  “You will find nothing,” the captain answered. “Men die when they are finished living, when the world ushers them out or drives them forth. You are trying to solve things that are mysteries, that are beyond our comprehension.”

  “This is basic science, Captain, not the blood and the body— perhaps it is lead poisoning or gas. It is vital for us to know.”

  “You are working at puzzles—fit the pieces together in the right way, rearrange them, and you will find their patterns, and so the puzzle is solved. But mysteries remain despite your puzzling, your cutting and chopping and prodding and measuring. You cannot solve them, because they are not composed of pieces that you can break down and rearrange. I have seen many men die and suffered the useless butchering of ignorant doctors who wanted to poke and prod to satisfy their own interests.”

  “This is fine to hear from old women and frightened priests, Captain, but surely it is not the argument of an intelligent man offered in the light of day! Are not your mysteries simply larger and larger puzzles? And as we uncover new pieces, will they not fit together like the parts of a map, until a region is fully mapped?”

  “We have seen the accuracy of your map by now, I hope!”

  “But now we know what we did not—because our maps are not accurate does not mean that mapping is useless. On the contrary, it means that we must be that much more vigilant in our mapmaking, surer of our observations, our measurements, our calculations—that we may finally have a map that is true.”

  “I have known many men like you—dividers, cutters, labelers, locusts all. For all your work, can you answer the most simple question: why does this blood continue to course through my hand? Blood there in my hand and in the hand of every man since time itself began, and tell me sir, can you explain it? It does not take the body of Christ to exceed you.”

  “We will be no more frightened of ghosts and monsters. Would you have us ignore what we see? What we can prove and replicate and have others verify? You are medieval. It is preposterous. Should we huddle in darkness when we are capable of creating light?”

  “There are lights that are worse than the darkness—the light you stuff into dead bodies as you carve them into pieces for your pleasure, seek to know yourself in dead things.”

  I could hear the doctor scoff.

  “That’s the trouble with you mystics—you slide into vagueness and hide as soon as you are cornered and called to account. You throw up your hands and mutter portentous nonsense.”

  “I would tear out my eyes if it would help me to see more of God.”

  There was a long silence, then the captain began again quietly.

  “There are many words with truth in them—perhaps you can feel the truth of them even if you cannot bring yourself to believe them or trust in them. It is a poor measure of truth that you must be able to cut it open on your table.”

  “I had a feeling of indigestion last night; I feel tired today— or perhaps it is the first sign of the mystical wholeness of the universe—yes, and I shall abandon science and wear a hairshirt and cover my face with ashes—no, wait—it is indigestion.” The doctor laughed harshly.

  “I will not permit the butchery of my men at your hands, sir,” said Captain Griffin stiffly. “I will not.”

  “You will let them die from a cause I can discover and perhaps prevent?”

  “You will discover nothing; you may find this or that which does not fit into your limited model—may look and impose your judgment in ignorance. You do not know why men die. You see only the wake of death passing, and call yourself capable of building the ship.”

  “You are in the employ of Mr. West, are you not? They are his men, and so we shall put it to him. If he wants to safeguard their health, I will proceed. If he wants to hold hands in the dark and chant, I will not stand in his—or your—way.”

  There was silence for a moment, then shuffling feet and the sound of the door closing. Aziz and I ran into the boiler room to try to hear their conversation with West. I scrambled onto the top of the coal heaped in the bin. It kept shifting beneath me and I could hear only snatches of what was said:

  “Widely held standard medical practice—his morbid preoccupations—danger to the crew—ill-used in death—defenseless against the encroachments of—you yourself, sir, could be the next . . .”

  Their voices rose and fell and rose again; the captain’s was shrill and insistent, the doctor’s righteous and calm. Finally they ceased to speak and a long silence followed; I managed to wedge myself atop the edge of the scuttle. West’s voice was quiet but clear.

  “Dr. Architeuthis, proceed. Captain, you will have your service after the autopsy is finished.”

  “Cross this line, and the world slips again into chaos,” said Griffin, so softly that I could hardly hear him.

  “I shall thank you, sir, to return to the management of the ship and keep your philosophizing to yourself,” said West, his voice rising.

  “Cut him, cut him,” replied the captain. “Of such truths each to itself must be the oracle.”

  “Perhaps, sir, you are overtired,” said West evenly. “I encourage some rest, that you might recover yourself.”

  The door creaked and shut again; footsteps passed down the corridor. I waited a few moments and then made my way up to the deck. As I opened the hatch, the doctor’s door opened.

  “Ah, there you are, Kane. I need your assistance.”

  I came into the lab. Hume’s body was stretched out naked on the white marble table. The doctor descended over him with a scalpel, and Hume’s sluggish blue-black blood ran to the edge of the slab, pooling, and draining down the channel at the edge of the table and disappearing into the drainpipe. I saw Hume’s sour face, and in it the sad and sour face of a child recoiling; I saw him twitch as the scalpel pierced the skin of his chest, the skin pulled back like the doors of a secret tabernacle to reveal his flesh white and his organs black beneath it. Using a hacksaw, the doctor removed the front of the rib cage and excavated the upper chest and neck, dug down into the crotch. One by one he cut free the organs and placed them carefully aside, pendulous liver and rubbery yellow intestines, shriveled lungs and the blackened calculus that was his poor heart. Other, smaller organs followed, unrecognizable handfuls of gland and connective tissue, a kidney; the doctor turned from the table, from Hume’s still-sour face and the great empty cavity of his body, to a row of glass jars arranged by size, with labels on their lids; he dropped each piece in and sealed the jar. In his precise hand he wrote Hume and the date, and handed it to me to place on the shelf. Using a bucket of seawater, the doctor rinsed the cavity free of blood and rinsed clean his slab. He took a large hooked needle and heavy thread and sewed Hume’s chest shut with rough strokes, pulling it until the flesh bulged on either side of the stitches. Then he took a small cloth and carefully washed his face and had me help get his shirt back on. Hume’s flesh was damp and spongy, and it left a smell on my clothes for many days afterward.

  “Well, Doctor?”

  “I don’t see anything here thus far. But I’ll perform some tests on the tissues.” We slid Hume into the sack and lugged him back to the deck.

  Dinner that evening was a somber a
ffair. We ate without pleasure and gathered on the deck by the mainmast. The doctor and Pago laid out the shrouded body at the railing while the captain read into the faint twilight. He finished and Hume’s body was hoisted as we sang a hymn. A small splash announced its departure. We bowed our heads a moment and returned to our work.

  That night, I stared at the bunk over me, seeing in its lumps and hollows the absent shape of his life—Hume pulling on his shirt, or stooping to shine his boots and laying them carefully aside.

  I thought of the pinched displeasure of his face, the shrill whine of his voice, felt myself recoil from him even in death as if he had passed to me some germ that would breed in my blood, banked up by my heart, that would lay waste to vital muscles within me and leave me exhaling from myself his stench of rot, interred in the same small and desolate world that had held him.

  I clutched after sleep as my heart pumped bile up into my throat, and I tried to spread my mind like oil over the sad and shivering creature that was my soul. From the blasted landscape of the ice to the barren cavity of Hume, I saw only emptinesses, blank spaces unfilled and unfillable; inside me, I felt the queasy turning of my own guts and the squalid thump of my heart.

  eleven

  Five bleak days passed. We made the motions of preparing to sail, but did not move. The captain kept us busy—repairing lines, checking sails, stowing the gear from our treks. At the completion of each task, we would wait, poised, for the order to weigh anchor, but it did not come. After a pause, Griffin would bellow another order from the deckhouse—rerig, restow, scrape clean the anchor chain, clear ice from the rigging that we had cleared a scarce hour before. The Narthex swung on her chains, as if anxious to be off herself, her nose swinging east, then west of north, like a great horse tossing her head with slow impatience, her sides knocking into the ice to keep it off. Smoke rose from the stack as Aziz fired the boiler, and we could hear the chuffing of the engine, then a whirring groan as it died away.