by Reif Larsen
“It is a lot of barley.”
“If the barley exists. But even if the barley does not exist, it doesn’t matter. Soon the world will not contain anything definitive anymore; it will only be said to contain things. We will exist in a system of total possibility. It is what I call un desdibujamiento. It’s a wonderful word, isn’t it? Un desdibujamiento. It means ‘the blurring of the local.’ The lines between here and there have begun to blur, and it is all because of the question of the box.” The captain leaned back. “But I can see I’m scaring you. You mustn’t let me get started on one of my little rants. Anyone will tell you this.”
“Desdibujamiento,” repeated Radar.
The captain nodded. “Like caressing a woman,” he said.
Radar wasn’t an expert in caressing women, so he said nothing. They sat in silence. The roll of the ship was causing an imperceptible shift in all the documents around the room. Radar could feel the papers shift back and forth on the desk ever so slightly.
“So tell me,” the captain said. “What are you boys going to do in the Congo? Lars wouldn’t give me a straight answer.”
Radar stiffened in his chair. “I don’t really think I can tell you.”
“I’m not in the habit of asking people their business, but you look like a man who can be trusted.”
“I’m sorry. I would have to ask Lars before—”
“Is it diamonds? Ivory? Ah—” He wagged a finger. “I know. Don’t tell me. It’s coltan. That’s what they’re taking out of there now. Blood coltan, they call it. For making mobile phones. That’s why they have you—el hechicero de la electrónica! It all makes sense now. I’ve seen people do exactly what you’re doing before.”
“We aren’t dealing in those things,” said Radar. “We’re performers.” He caught his breath, but it was too late.
“Performers?” the captain said, raising a gargantuan eyebrow.
“I’m sorry.” Radar lifted his hands. “I can’t say any more.”
“Well. My little troupe of performers. What are you performing, then?”
“You can’t tell them I told you.”
“Go on. Taming of the Shrew? Parsifal? Waiting for Godot?”
“I don’t fully know, if I’m being quite honest. It involves puppets.”
“Puppets? Ave María!”
Radar lifted his hands into a pleading prayer. “I’m sorry, I’ve said too much.”
“And where are you performing with this puppet show?”
“Can you please not say anything to Lars or Otik? I don’t think they’re big fans of me at the moment, and they certainly won’t be if they find out I told you anything.”
“I like you, Mr. Radmanovic. What did you say you were? American? You don’t seem like an American to me. You’re too good at listening.”
“I don’t really know what I am.”
“If I may—a word of advice. You’ve got to be careful where you’re going. The system still has its boundaries. And once you get to these boundaries, things begin to get a little hairy. Un poco peligroso. In the Congo, the box is said to contain x, but the box will not contain x. The box will contain nothing. Or something else entirely. It will drive a man insane.”
“I think that’s why we’re going there. To perform where the system has broken down.”
The captain lifted his arms. “Performers! To think, this whole time and I had no idea. Well, I love it. The Aleph has never had its own performers, have you, my little darling?” He reached out and tenderly stroked the wall of the cabin.
Suddenly the captain jumped up from his seat.
“Come,” he said. “There’s something I’d like to show you.”
They took three flights of stairs down to the main deck and then out a doorway and into the chilly night. Radar looked up. The stars enveloped them like a casket. He followed Daneri as he wandered through the maze of containers, the captain tapping their sides with his hand as if they were a herd of animals. They wove their way toward the bow and then turned and passed through a doorway that Radar had never seen before. They went down a small flight of stairs to a tween deck below the main deck, where they followed several more narrow corridors before slipping through another doorway and down two more flights of stairs. Radar had long since lost his bearings. If he were not with the captain, he would never be able to get back again. He was not even sure they were on the same ship anymore.
The captain abruptly stopped.
“Here,” he said, pointing to a crimson container illuminated only by a dim sea light on the far wall.
“What is it?”
“Open it.”
“Am I allowed to?”
“This one doesn’t belong to them.”
Radar was afraid the box would be either locked or horrendously complicated to open, but he pulled a lever and heard a satisfying click, and the door swung open easily. A familiar smell. A smell of home. He peered into the darkness, half expecting to see his mother, his father, to see everything the way it was before. He squinted. At first he could not understand what he was looking at, but then he saw them. Books. Endless stacks of books. Thousands of them.
“I deliver one of these every time I do the West African route.”
“Who does it go to?”
“He’s a remarkable man. He has a library in the middle of the jungle. It is said to contain every book in the world. Of course, this is impossible. But it’s a noble pursuit. And I’m glad to play my part.”
Radar stared at the books, lying, waiting like corpses. The captain swung the door shut.
“Or maybe it’s just a glitch,” he said. “Maybe the library does not exist. But the system demands it, and I must deliver what the system demands.”
5
On the evening of the sixth day, the seas began to swell. An electricity spread through the normally stoic crew. The men chatted nervously in the galley and then dumped their trays and left early to take care of their evening rounds. Hatches needed to be battened, stacking braces secured.
At the officers’ table, Radar sensed a palpable air of anticipation.
“We’re in for something nasty,” Ivan confirmed over his goulash.
“Is this normal for this time of year?” Lars asked politely.
“There’s no normal when it comes to the sea,” said Daneri.
“The radar didn’t see much,” said Akaki, the chief mate.
“The radar never sees much,” said the captain. “We’re in for one tonight.”
Ivan, seeing the alarm on Radar’s face, leaned over and whispered, “I wouldn’t worry.”
Back in Moby-Dikt, Otik, who had not been present at dinner, had already imploded into the sinkhole of his nausea. He lay on his cot, pale and moaning, one paw gripping the rim of his vomit bucket.
“Please,” he mumbled, delirious. “Tell my father . . .”
“He’ll be all right,” said Lars.
But Otik did not look all right. “Tell my father . . . to meet me at the café,” he whispered.
Lars tried to continue at the workbench, though even his normally glowing Nordic countenance had faded to a pale shade of avocado. The pitching grew worse, and his tools began to slide off the bench and clatter onto the floor.
With nothing else to do, Radar burrowed down into his bed and tried to sleep. As he lay supine, the boat’s roll and pitch became magnified. He closed his eyes, trying to reassure himself with the protection offered by these great layers of steel wrapped around his little cot. Surely such an awesome creation of man was immune to the forces of nature? He thought of the Titanic and its own claims to invincibility. The Aleph was no Titanic. She was made of much weaker stock. A shiver passed through him. Outside their container, the ship creaked and groaned. When Radar finally drifted off, his dreams were, as usual, fitful, incomprehensible affairs marked by leaks sprouting i
n hulls, horses swimming in open oceans, German U-boats breaching the surface in an explosion of foam.
After several hours of tossing and being tossed, Radar was awoken by a sharp, stabbing pain on his forehead. He opened his eyes to find the inside of the container in chaos, the world tipping upward at an impossible angle. It was as if a giant had decided to pick up the opposite corner of the box in order to get a peek at him. The downward slope had caused much of the equipment to come off the walls and the chairs to all slide up against his cot. In his bed he found several tools, including the one that had apparently attacked him: a silver T square. He touched his fingers to his head. They came away wet with blood.
Just when it appeared as if the world could not possibly tip any more, lest the floor become the ceiling and visa versa, they reached a kind of equilibrium point. There was a moment of rest, and then the container began to pitch steadily back in the other direction. The loose tools, the teakettle, and the conference of chairs dutifully complied with this new incline by sliding away to the opposite wall. Radar saw one of his boots tumble by. Again, just when it seemed the container would flip entirely, the angle of repose was reached, and the chairs came sliding back to him. Radar gripped the edge of the cot, transfixed by this display of inanimate migration.
“Help me with . . . would you?” he heard someone shout.
He looked up and saw Lars pressed against a rack of tools. Lars’s legs were dancing about as if he were a drunkard, flailing against the extreme rolls of the boat. His furious effort to contain the remaining tools was proving futile.
“What’s going on?” Radar shouted. A stupid question.
“It’s . . . storm,” yelled Lars. This word did not come close to capturing what was taking place inside the container. To be sure, the ship had been engaged in a slight roll and pitch ever since their departure, a vectoring that Radar had steadily grown accustomed to, unlike poor Otik. But this was such a grotesque display of the sea’s violence that the situation would have been laughable if it weren’t so utterly, utterly terrifying.
“When did it get so bad?” Radar shouted. The container had reached its angular apogee and was now lurching in the other direction, causing the chairs to march away again. More clattering and a crash as the lathe toppled over onto a computer.
“The . . . half an hour . . . so . . . can’t.” Lars moved to the lathe, trying to extricate it from the IBM.
“What?” Radar yelled. He realized he couldn’t hear what Lars was saying because of the incredible racket that was reverberating throughout the container. It was one of the more horrible sounds he had ever heard—a groan sustained and amplified into a curdling wail that came and went, came and went, like the wail of a mother who has just lost her son. Except that this wail came not from any living creature but from the ship itself. The bones of the ship were crying.
“Where’s Otik?” yelled Radar over the noise. Otik’s cot was empty save for fifty or so errant bird heads, which rolled and tumbled across the sheets.
Lars pointed.
Beneath the terrible yowl of the wind, Radar heard a noise. It was a human wheeze. An escaping of air from parted lips.
“Otik?”
Radar stumbled over to the cot, dodging the minefield of detritus on the move, and found him on the floor, half wrapped in a top sheet, facedown, bird heads all around, a thin puddle of merguez-colored vomit spilling from his mouth like a speech bubble.
Otik murmured something inaudible.
“What?” Radar leaned in. The man’s giant back was hot to the touch. The ship reached the peak of its roll, hung, and came hurtling down again, bird heads tumbling everywhere. A chair hit them and Radar winced, trying to shield himself.
“Molim te,” Otik wheezed. “Ja umirem.”
“You’re going to be okay, Otik,” said Radar, rubbing his back. “It’s just a storm. It won’t be long now.” He had no idea how long it would be. The storm felt like it might last forever.
“I’m dying,” wheezed Otik.
“You’re not dying, Otik,” said Radar. He blundered across the room and grabbed a towel. Scrambling back to Otik, nearly falling into him, he began to wipe at the vomit smeared across the floor.
“Lars!” he yelled. “We need to get out of here!”
“Ostavi me,” mumbled Otik. “Reci im da mi je žao. Reci im da nisam kreten.”
“Don’t say that, Otik. You’re going to be fine.”
“Ja sam Dubre,” Otik wheezed.
“You’re doing good work,” said Radar. “You’re doing great work. No one can do what you do.”
“Ja nisam dobra osoba.”
“Ti si dobar covek, Charlie Brown,” said Radar. It was one of the few lines he could say in Serbian.
Otik opened his eyes and looked up at Radar. He was crying. Radar tried to heave him off the floor. It was like trying to lift a small car.
“Lars!” he called. “We need to get him out of here. The tools—” He ducked as a bow saw came flying off its hook and twanged against the table.
Lars had a rope in his hand and was attempting to lash the lathe to the wall. The lights inside the container suddenly flickered and went out. Radar felt his heart sink. Not another blackout. Here? In the middle of the ocean? In the middle of the storm of all storms? He could think of nothing worse.
The lights blinked and buzzed back on again. Radar looked up. The birds. He had forgotten about the birds. They still hung from the ceiling, swaying wildly about, palindroming with the sea.
“Lars!”
“What?”
“We’ve got to get him out of here!” he yelled.
With much effort, they managed to half-carry, half-drag Otik out the door.
“Ostavite me,” he kept saying. “Ostavite me, ostavite me.”
Outside, in cargo hold number four, there were no flying projectiles, but the sound was even more hellacious than inside the container. The wail had turned into a full-pitched scream, and Radar could hear the ribs of the ship straining, their fibers pulled and compressed to the breaking point. It was like being in the belly of a dying whale. At the next roll, Radar tripped and fell and immediately found himself soaked. The floor of the hold was covered in seawater. The water quickly slopped away as the roll reached its vertex and then just as quickly came spilling back onto him. The beams, the bulwark, the very superstructure of the ship screeched in protest. From somewhere ahead, what sounded like an essential support cracked, and the cargo hold around him gave what could only be described as a death rattle.
For the first time, Radar saw what was going to happen: This ship is going to sink. I’m going to die on this ship. The idea of his own death did not elicit panic but rather resignation, as if he had known it would end like this the whole time.
“Get him upstairs!” shouted Lars. “There’s a lounge on the lower deck.”
Radar snapped out of his morose reverie and grabbed Otik’s shoulder. Urged on by adrenaline and the threat of a watery grave, they maneuvered themselves to the opening of the stairwell. Radar would have thought it impossible to go any farther, but somehow they pinballed up the four flights of stairs despite his own handicaps, the immensity of Otik’s mass, and the heave and throes of the boat. Radar’s shoulders were sore from crashing against one wall after another. Yet he had almost grown accustomed to the rhythms of the egregious rolling and pitching. Even if the rules of the world had gone haywire, he sensed a method to this madness. When the boat reached the top of its tilt axis, his body was already readying itself for the release and the counter-tilt.
They slammed against the door to the lounge and then collapsed onto the floor. The lounge was abandoned. The Little Mermaid was playing silently on the television. Radar lay there, panting, watching Sebastian merrily sing and leap about on the screen, when a single idea occurred to him: Ivan. He need to find Ivan. If he was with Ivan, all would be oka
y.
“I’m going upstairs,” he said.
“Better to stay here,” said Lars. “Who knows what’s out there?”
The boat reversed its roll. The ship groaned.
“I’m going!” said Radar. “I’ll be right back.”
Back in the stairwell, he staggered upward. His load was lightened, but it seemed as if the higher he went in the ship, the worse the pitching became. He finally made it to the top corridor, staggering, falling, grabbing hold of a stowed fire hose. He could see the hallway literally twisting and torquing like a Slinky.
Everyone up here must be dead! Thrown overboard or smashed to smithereens!
After some desperate balletics, he managed to make it to the doorway of the bridge and threw it open, expecting carnage.
But there was no carnage. The scene was one of remarkable serenity. And there was Ivan, standing at the helm, feet planted like a matador, nine fingers upon the wheel.
Oh, sweet, sweet Ivan!
Ivan’s face was completely calm, his eyes betraying no sense of unease as his gaze held fast into the very depths of the storm. It was a standoff—man versus nature—and seeing him like this, Radar could not bet against man.
Next to him, the chief mate, Akaki, was hunched over the radar, his face barely six inches from the screen. Several paces away stood Captain Daneri in his crisp white uniform. He looked as if he were attending a funeral. One hand firmly gripped the bridge console, but otherwise none of the three seemed particularly bothered by gravity’s complete disintegration.