Death, Sleep & the Traveler: Novel (New Directions Books) Page 3

  But there is no image or analogy with which to evoke the taste of water, which happens to correspond to the view I hold generally of life. The thought of salt water is unbearable to me. My desire for fresh water is increasing daily. I number myself among those few men who are able to admit that their thirst is unquenchable.

  “Allert,” Peter said, “what do you think of my theory that a man remains a virgin until he has committed murder?”

  There were two life jackets stored on the top shelf of the narrow closet in my cabin. Staring into the closet that was nearly empty except for the life jackets, and also staring into the mirror fastened to the inside of the closet door, in this way I saw myself in the mirror in my undershorts. I imagined myself strapped into one of the orange jackets, I thought of myself tying the white cords in the darkness of a night at sea. It pleased me to think that I had lost track of time.

  And yet the sight of two life jackets caused me a certain uneasiness, as did the two pillows on the bed, the two chairs covered with flowered chintz, the smell of soap and sea air in the cabin, the absence of anything personal in this cabin that was obviously intended for two persons but occupied by only one. I did not wish the company of the other shipboard passengers, and yet I believed that I would never feel at home in a stateroom with so much false decoration and from which some second unknown person was forever missing.

  I replaced one of the white cords that was dangling. I dropped my shorts, I felt the humming of the ship in the soles of my feet, I prepared myself in trunks, straw slippers, dark glasses and white terry cloth robe for a session at the edge of the ship’s pool. I drank from the plastic glass-lined flask of ice water. I studied myself through the large black lenses of the sunglasses.

  Then I left my cabin. I took my towel, my straw hat, my book, and even as I detoured down to the deck below instead of walking directly to the pool that was situated on my own deck in the aft of the ship, I found myself distrusting what appeared to be the monotony of the ship’s steady course. The curious levitation I felt in the softly lit corridor was sure to give way to some abrupt shock or a sudden diminution of forward speed and then a pause and then the terrible pull of the propellers churning in reverse. A clear day was no guarantee against the diving and rising monsters of the deep.

  The length of the corridor was spanned underfoot by a thin rubber mat and overhead by a series of muted light bulbs in steel cages. A fire axe was bolted to the bulkhead behind a sheet of glass. I could hear my slippers marking my solitary progress down the corridor. Through the thickly-smoked lenses of my dark glasses the details of the corridor were so darkly obliterated that it might have been leading me through some unfamiliar hotel or through the severe structure of a bad dream, except that the corridor was not level, following as it did the contours of the white hull, and in the very nuclear substance of its steel plates was filled with all the physical by-products of the stresses of what could be nothing other than a ship in motion on a flat sea.

  Her cabin door was open. Hardly able to see my way, smelling fresh paint and the grease of electrical cables and the fresh lingering scent of my recent shower, I knew immediately that her cabin door was open, not hooked partially ajar with a brass hook as were many of the doors I passed, but standing fully open so that I could not help but see the partially opened porthole, the pen and loose sheets of paper on the writing desk, the archaic typewriter, the orange beach robe flung on a chair, the small and still dripping swim suit dangling from one of the thick brass ring-bolts around the porthole. I could not help but see the wireless officer half propped on the unmade bed in his tunic and undershorts, and see also the young woman who, dressed in a boy’s white undershirt and a pair of tight blue denim pants, was standing before a small ironing board and pressing what were obviously the wireless officer’s white trousers.

  Her hair was still damp. Her rump was a little sectioned fruit in the tight blue pants, her feet were bare, her energetic upper body was like a child’s. The wireless officer was reading something, a book or magazine, on her unmade bed. She was ironing his white trousers as if to do so were a commonplace of both the past and present.

  When I again reached the upper deck I reversed my direction, shunned the pool, and returned to my cabin where in robe and slippers and dark glasses I lay flat on the flowered bedspread that was stretching like a sterile skin across my empty bed.

  I was unable to read. Only considerable inner concentration prevented me from donning one of the orange life jackets over my white robe.

  He was at my side. The moonlight was on the rail, on the deck, on the waves and foam below us, and the wireless officer was at my side. One of his white shoes was hooked on a lower rung of the ship’s rail.

  “Sometimes, when a man is in the winter of life,” he said, “he begins to find young women attractive. He begins to pursue younger and younger women. He intrudes where he is not wanted. He finds himself unable to seduce the girl away from the younger man. He attempts unsuccessfully to be their friend, burning all the while only to touch the girl. He makes a fool of himself.”

  I thought of the moonlight turning the sea’s black salt to silver, for an instant I saw the crumpled white uniform streaked with algae. In the moonlight he was picking his fingernails with a small bone-colored cuticle stick.

  “If you think I am in the winter of life, as you put it,” I said, suppressing my anger, “you are mistaken. Very much mistaken.”

  “Allert,” Peter said, breathing his frozen breath into the silence between us, “I would like to take you up on your suggestion. Do you remember?”

  In woolen socks and rubber boots cut off at the knee and with silver-barreled shotguns cradled in our arms that were bent and stuffed with warm padding like the arms of gigantic male dolls, thus Peter and I were walking across the pre-dawn snow, side by side. He was smoking his little curved white meerschaum pipe with the amber stem. The lines of elegance on his long face appeared to have been skillfully cut by a pointed instrument into Spanish leather.

  “Yes,” he said, “I accept your proposal. Ursula and I will welcome the regularity.”

  A single compact bird flew low over our heads and away in a long curving trajectory of great speed. Peter’s breath was like snow that had undergone sudden transformation, the little round white bowl of his pipe reminded me of the gonad of some child god, a second bird skimmed by in pursuit of the first. And still he and I walked on together, contemplating the closeness achieved by certain psychic ties.

  It was then, after we had walked perhaps another hundred yards, that I had my vision of Peter sealed at last in his lead box but with his penis bursting through the roof of the box like an angry asphodel.

  On my way to the pool, which was small but deep and constructed in the shape of a slippery amoeba, I steadied myself against the pitch and roll of the bone-colored wooden deck and glanced up toward the projecting wing of the ship’s bridge, where I saw him, hatless, black hair curling in the bright wind, arms on the rail, foot raised and resting on the white rung, tunic unbuttoned at the throat, bitter young eyes directed toward some invisible point off the prow of the ship, the kind of young wireless operator who would one day soon deserve the severest sentence of some maritime tribunal. I wondered what pocket in his tunic, left or right, contained one of the famous photographs. Clearly he was enjoying himself and not on duty.

  But we dipped into another trough, the ship rolled to recover, the spray climbed high, I stumbled on toward the blue water gyrating now in the pool at the stern.

  I staggered and dropped my book. The spray was sliding down the dark lenses of my sunglasses, today there could be no doubt of our motion and our direction. I was willing to suffer any amount of motion sickness, which actually I did not anticipate at the moment, for the sake of just such comprehensible turbulence under a clear sun. I had only to balance myself at the edge of the pool, one hand on my belly and the other clutching the aluminum upright of the diving board, in order to perceive the reassuring concr
eteness of waves, foam, spray, persistent escort of gray gulls, a few orange rinds brightening our wake, the sudden dangerous angle of the bright blue water in the ship’s pool. Our propellers, great pieces of underwater brass statuary, were today functioning with purpose, with power. There was no one in sight. I swayed, lifted my protected eyes toward the nearest gull, and then I felt the pool water—blue only because the inside of the pool itself was painted blue—rising and rolling upward to meet the flying spray.

  “Allert,” she called, precisely as my extended hands and head and puffy shoulders struck the blue water and I, with lungs distended and eyes open, began to descend. I took the small and feminine sound of her voice with me on my way to the bottom. As I dove down, a huge man in blue trunks upended in a small deep body of water that was pitching and sliding in counter-violence to the afternoon’s heavy seas, the faint clear welcome voice remained afloat in my ear, like a second swimmer undulating downward with violent strokes. My name was submerged in the sound of her voice, her voice in my name, while I myself was deeply submerged in the pool of captive sea water that was thoroughly still now and of a darker blue than before. My eyes were open and I was working my arms and pectoral muscles in the slow rhythm of some luminous under-water butterfly. The nearest wall of the pool was driven into the water like a blue knife at a steep angle. A ladder-like series of empty holes for the hands and feet climbed sharply to the surface on which the shadows of spray and foam and the girl’s outstretched leg were falling. I knew I was quite alone in the pool.

  The invigorating pain of held breath, the black and white tiles like those of a lavatory floor, a drain hole covered with wire mesh, body more sensitive than ever to the weight of the water and the exertion of flotation, suddenly I had in fact achieved the bottom, as I was not always able to do on such occasions, and I put the flat of one hand on the tiles, concentrated on remaining down there as if anchored by a chunk of rusted iron, waited until I had surely propitiated the god of all those in fear of drowning at sea, and then pushed off, rolling onto my back, and prolonged the ritualized agony of the return to the surface by forcing my stiffened body to rise of its own accord, unaided by the use of either stroking hands or kicking feet.

  “Allert,” she called only moments after I re-emerged head and shoulders into the random forces of that bright day, “it’s dangerous to swim when the sea is so rough!”

  With a laugh and one upraised slippery arm I acknowledged her concern for my welfare and also conveyed my appreciation of her presence at the edge of the pool where she sat in splendid girlish near-nudity with one childish leg thrust over the water and dripping. I waved again, I snorted, I shook off the water, my shoulders heaved, I struck out to cover the short choppy distance to the glare of the fiery ladder. Gasping repeatedly and voraciously for breath, and feeling the dead flow of all my returning weight, and managing to catch hold of the hot aluminum that was curled like the horns of some great artificial goat, slowly I dragged myself back to the deck of the pitching ship and to the heat of the white towel which, while I was on the bottom of the pool, she had spread out behind her.

  “Allert,” she said as I collapsed face down on the towel, “I am not going into the pool today. It’s too rough. I am not as strong as you are.”

  I grunted and rested my cheek on my soft pinkish hands, one of which was pillowing the other, and felt the upper portion of the small seated buttocks fitting tightly into my hollow side while the water trickled slowly from my ears and mouth. I did not need to open my eyes to know she was there, since I could see her with my eyes quite shut: scant and pale blue halter and bikini bottom indistinguishable from underwear, small nubile body hairless and unmarked except for a scar in the shape of a fishhook below her navel, small face whose weight and shape I could contain nicely in one hand, soft intensely black hair concealed now beneath her bathing cap, little white rubber bathing cap with the flaps upraised like those of a pilot’s old-fashioned leather helmet after an arduous flight. Even with the warm water trickling from one of my ears and the pain subsiding from my lungs and the ship pitching and rolling in a ring of bright spray, still in the darkness I could see her perfectly because, as I had long since decided, she was the only other person on the ship I was willing to know.

  “Allert,” she said more softly, though we were alone on the stern of the rising and falling ship and alone in the wind and sun, “how does it happen that you are such a smooth lover?”

  “You seem to be speaking about oil,” I replied, humming and mouthing the words with pleasure, “and not at all speaking about a man. Shame on you!”

  But of course she responded at once to the kindly tone of my chiding by leaning down and placing her lips against the loose fat along my left shoulder and suddenly creating with her mouth, as small as it was, a sensation of extreme and pointed suction. Then she rested her cheek where her mouth had been and sighed, stretched out beside me and began gently stroking me in the rolls of fat along my ribs. Her cheek on my shoulder was like a wafer in a field of snow.

  “Allert,” she whispered, as we lay there under a curving sheet of bright spray, “let’s go down to my cabin right now and strip off our clothes. Shall we?”

  Her name, as I learned inevitably and fairly soon in the voyage, was Ariane. I thought that the name Ariane was quite typical of those elegant names bestowed so often on female children in poor families. At once I recognized the name for the type it was, and recognized its purpose, its poor taste, its pathos. At once I found the name extremely appealing because of its simplicity and sentimentality).

  Ariane was the name of the young woman I knew so emotionally and so briefly on the cruise. I do not find the name appealing now.

  “Allert,” Peter said, “I have a request. I would like to give you and Ursula an in-depth psychological test. Ursula agrees. And, after all, there is no reason why our friendship should not further my line of work. You must admit that the two of you would be excellent subjects. What do you say?”

  He was smoking his pipe. I was smoking my cigar. Peter’s darkened study smelled as if everything in it was constructed not of wood and leather, which was actually the case, but of compressed blocks of rich and acrid tobacco. Green tobacco, I thought, searching for my friend’s profile in the unlighted room, remarkable green tobacco evocative of the time when I myself was a helpless boy.

  “You know what I think of psychiatrists,” I said with the cigar not inches from my waiting lips. “But for you, my friend, anything. In the right company I have nothing to hide.”

  Unfortunately Peter was not able to administer the test before his death.

  My life has always been uncensored, overexposed. Each event, each situation, each image stands before me like a piece of film blackened from overexposure to intense light. The figures within my photographic frames are slick but charred. In the middle of the dark wood I am a golden horse lying dead on its side across the path and rotting.

  “Why do I have the impression that we two are the only people on board this ship?”

  “Perhaps because you are not in general friendly, Allert.”

  “But I am remarkably friendly as you well know.” “Besides, you are certainly aware of the officers and crew. You are aware of them all the time.”

  “Perhaps after all these years I am jealous.”

  “Poor Allert, there is no need to be.”

  Peter, who was lean and naked, bent his knees and clasped his ankles and arched his spine and drew himself into his favorite Yoga position. His lap formed a broad and angular receptacle bearing his genitals which, I noted, lay there like some kind of excreted pile of waste fired in a blazing kiln and then varnished.

  “The one thing you ought to know, Peter,” Ursula was saying, “is that Allert and I go very well together in bed. We always have.”

  Ursula’s honesty was quite enough to shatter the glaze on Peter’s genitals.

  My cheeks were burning from the wind and sun, my lungs were filled with the smell of the sea. I
t was dusk and I was returning from my newly discovered place of utter privacy, a position on the bow of the ship concealed by the wheels and plates of a great winch painted with thick and glistening black paint. I had watched the sun lowering in the western quadrant, I had detected no clue of approaching land. Was I free or lost, exhilarated or merely flushed with grief? I did not know. I did not know what to make of myself or of all these elements, these details, this fresh but oddly traumatic moment of sunset, except to intuit that I was more youthful and yet closer to death than I had ever been. At least my feelings were mixed, to say the least, when I inserted the brass key in the lock of my cabin door. The porthole, which gave only onto the deck, was sealed.

  I saw immediately the small photograph lying undisturbed on the flat leather surface of my locked and as yet unpacked valise. Each object was in itself quite ordinary, the valise, the photograph, though taken together, the one on top of the other, each diminished in some small way the reality of the other, or at least altered it. With my hand on the brass door handle, and my hair and figure still disheveled from the touch of the now vanished wind, standing in this way just inside my cabin and seeing the photograph on the valise which in its turn lay on its stand, it was then that a new dictum passed slowly through my mind to the effect that the smallest alteration in the world of physical objects produces the severest and most frightening transformation of reality. Compared with the sight of the photograph curling slightly at the edges and lying somewhat off-center in the field of golden leather—ordinary, improbable, inexplicable, ringed with invisible chains of unanswerable questions—actual vandalism of my silent cabin, had it in fact occurred, would have been nothing.