by James O'Reilly, Larry Habegger, Sean O'Reilly (ed) (retail) (epub)
And indeed most everyone agreed with my decision to sail around the world with two men I had just met, even my own mother, despite her real panic that I’d also die. Everyone agreed—with bells and stars!—because people will just eat up that romantic bullshit. Because as much as it is bullshit, so is it the food we survive on. There MUST be another option than the way we are normally living, and we MUST believe that some brave few will find that option, and tell us about it—the swish and the glory of True Love. The relief of being, at last, in the comfort and safety of Following Your Heart with your One.
The captain had agreed to take me on board in exchange for my services as a movement educator. When the captain had first had his stroke, the doctors told him one third of his brain was toast, and that he should plan on never walking, talking, or reading again. He couldn’t talk yet when they told him that, but he said he laughed. Don’t tell me what I can’t do. He learned it all back, enough to walk, read, and even sail, though he did still struggle with speaking and finding words, and he wanted my help going deeper into the work with his body. “You can’t hurt anything in me,” he assured me when I told him I’d never worked with a stroke patient. “There’s nowhere to go but up.”
I tried to believe him. I took my appointed job very seriously. I gripped my anatomy books aloft and explained developmental movement exercises to him with my knee wedged into the corner of the bench, my other foot stabilizing against the toolbox as the boat bucked and he steered. I balanced above him as he lay in a nest of ropes, and I unwound the tension in his neck with one hand while I held on to the rigging with the other hand. My biggest fear was that something would happen to him. It was quickly becoming apparent that my One was as incompetent as me in the sailing department. Every time he was left on watch, it was inevitable that the boat would start spinning in circles or else heading in the completely wrong direction. If the captain went out to check on the fishing pole or tie a line I’d watch him with knife-eyed attention, as though my stare could pin him to the boat. If he fell over I knew that neither my One or I had the ability to turn the boat around to get him. I worried about his sleeping, if he was getting enough, about him stroking out again, or his elbow wound getting infected. I begged him to wash his hands after touching the raw chicken. “Salmonelli, is that you?” he taunted me, mocking a kiss to the raw, pink flesh, but let me spray his hands with antibacterial wash and wiped them on the paper towel I handed him, smiling at me out of the side of his mouth. “Well for a goddamn piece of chicken you’re bout ready to die for it, it ain’t worth it, right?”
And thus the days and the nights passed. A roll of blue wind and water and moments together. Our bodies moving always with the crash of the waves. Learning how to balance on the ocean’s constant change. Dishwashing, peeling potatoes, cooking meals for each other, all became a dance—an ever present awareness of our connection to both gravity and sky. In the mornings, as we drank coffee together, we marveled at our hand’s intelligence, the way, when you left it to its own device, it knew how to constantly adjust the angle of the cup to the shifting floor of the boat in order to keep the scalding liquid from spilling out. “How does it know? I mean really, how does it know how to do that?” We’d shake our heads, watching our hands, our full cups, utterly entertained.
We discussed, told stories, were silent often, and laughed more than anything else. We laughed about my One’s multiple douses of the kitchen in coffee, then the Captain’s early morning spill of the same. The kitchen a wasteland of eggshells, coffee grounds, banana peels, bruised apples and soggy paper towels. My One attempted banana bread, and it ended up in three different piles on the floor. We ate the remains—a half-cooked pancake sized slab that was raw in the middle and burnt on the outside. “Enough of the yellow shit and its all good,” said the captain, applying another spoonful of butter.
We listened to Sirius radio for company, the songs like people we invited over to play. The Captain would put it on the seventies Rock station, my One on Classic Country, me on the Love station, where they played all the love songs from my middle school years—Baby Face “Missing You” and Journey “Faithfully.” We counted how many songs, on all of the stations, made references to sailing—it was about one in three. My One, an extremely talented writer, said “What if, when we get out of here and try to write, the only metaphors we’ll be able to use are ones having to do with the sea?” This, after I’d said of my headache, “The pain comes in waves.” I was singing along with the Love station. “This guy was my favorite singer in elementary school,” I told him at a break in the chorus.
“What’s his name?”
“Billy Ocean.”
We met eyes and cracked into hysterics for the fifth time that morning. Our eyes streaming from the giggles, until the captain told us to go drink water—“People only laugh like that about nothing if they’re stoned or dehydrated or both,” he said.
All this, and the ever-changing landscape of the sea. At once caring so much and caring so little of us. Every day we rode onward, and when I closed my eyes, or at night too, it was as though we were also on land, being carried on the back of some slow dancing elephant, waltzing so tirelessly through the endless, shifting sand. And there was no Time, and I was no longer Dayna, failing at growing up, or failing at making money, failing at getting married or making a life that I thought I should make—no, there was just every day the water, and love, and the sweet Unknown.
The sun was setting, and I was just preparing to start a therapy session with the Captain, when the wind came up. My One said his stomach hurt, and he went to bed early, skipping his watch duty. The captain hadn’t slept in days but he didn’t complain; he climbed into his negative-thirty-degree jumpsuit and hunkered down behind the wheel—“Whatever, I’ve only been doing it all of my life,” he said in response to my concern. I had drunk too much coffee earlier in the day and my nerves felt shot, also my stomach hurt. In the forward cabin my One and I fell into thick sleep and woke feeling battered and angry in the mouth of a terrific storm.
It was almost impossible to stand. Impossible to walk. I felt sick and scared, and he found me later lying on the prow, where I was gripping onto the line and sucking slow breath from the crashing wind. With high, glassy eyes and a sick-sweet smile he said, “Why didn’t you clean the kitchen?”
All the hairs stood up on my neck. I’d never heard that voice from him, and I couldn’t place whatever tone I was hearing. It sounded like . . . hatred. “What do you mean why didn’t I clean the kitchen? No one can clean the kitchen. No one can even stand up right now.”
His wide, stretched-mouth smile didn’t shift an inch as he held on to the mast of the thrashing boat. “I just realized you are a selfish princess, that’s all. I can’t believe I didn’t see it before. You’re just lying there. It’s a metaphor for everything. You give nothing, absolutely nothing.”
I’d never heard a cruel word from him before. But what was more shocking was that I’d just, the day before, confessed tearfully to him that my deepest fear sometimes was that I wasn’t giving enough to the world, that perhaps my choices to live the life of an artist were merely choices of a selfish, self-centered princess. He’d held me and assured me that my presence on the planet had immeasurable worth, no matter what I did, and he’d been sweet, and comforting, as one would wish any boyfriend to be. But now he was standing above me, somewhat gleefully and systematically twisting the words I’d said to him earlier, a look of terrible scorn in his sea-glass eyes. I gaped at him as the prow crashed down the slope of another forty-foot swell.
I can’t say that he hadn’t warned me. Sometime between taking him to my best friend’s wedding and falling madly in love with him he had warned me—that he was “fucked up,” that he’d been given a sociopath psychological test and showed a 95-percent chance of being one, that he had a bit of a split in his personality, and sometimes he flipped into this snake, and he knew it, and he loved it, because it was his power and he could use it against o
ther people, to manipulate bad people, but he’d never use it against me. Something to that effect. Obviously I hadn’t really been too concerned.
But as the storm gathered in volume, as I looked up into the dull, flat malevolence of his face, I realized I’d made a mistake, again. That I’d lost my own course for another man who turned out to be, for an entirely different reason, but still—again—a total flop. That our hours of play, lovemaking, and laughter in the end were no match for this gaping hole of a man who was now, in a smooth, velvet-lined voice saying, “You’ll never succeed at what you want to do. It’s just all ideas in your head that will never become real, because you’re too selfish to really love, and you’re not talented enough to make good art.” I didn’t move, or breathe, or look at him, so terrified at this shift in someone who I had just, hours earlier, felt so close to. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I’m really sorry,” I said finally. Thinking that if I was sweet enough he would snap out of it, come back to me. I didn’t know yet that I was just becoming the ultimate dream of the sociopath: a willing victim.
The storm grew around us. He held onto the ropes, and his voice so thankfully got lost in the wind as I gripped hold of the side of the boat. The waves crashed over the prow, drenching our clothes. From the bowels of the ship came a long, drawn out moan. The autopilot had broken. The captain, at the wheel, cursed. I clambered my way to where he was, and my One followed me. The Captain wrestled with the wheel, turning us further west, into the swells. The navigation system showed us as a tiny red boat bumbling out farther and farther into white space. No land. I was suddenly so scared I could barely hold on to the rope. My eyes locked on the darkness where the wind was slamming us, my chest like ice was on the inside, and growing, as my One tried to get to me across the space between port and starboard benches—he wanted to hold me. “I’ve got you, I’m here,” he was trying to say to me, like a sadist who wants to bandage the wounds he himself has just cut. In wild-eyed panic I looked to the Captain, whose white-blue eyes were so steady on me I felt I could have physically held on to his stare. “Trust the boat,” he said.
In the morning the storm had barely died down, but at least we could see the way the waves were hitting us and the steadiness of the boat, righting herself again and again, regardless of what this motion was doing to our stomachs.
“You’ll be fine out here, Dayna,” the Captain said. “I knew that the first day I met you.” The water lifted and tossed us forward. The wind whipping at the plastic sheeting around the cabin as I held tight to the rope and fought down nausea. “Because there’s nothing like it. People can talk about it, or think about it, or sing about it, but you don’t know until you’re out here. There’s something you can’t know unless you’re here. And I know you want to know it.”
I wanted to know it.
What the sea knew.
So I gripped on to that boat and listened through the roar of my fear, as our moods, our sleep, dreams, meals, words blended into the storm’s song; complicated, eternal, battered, day after day after day.
My One got worse—tearing through any intimate vulnerability I had ever shared with him and prodding me with twisted versions of it to see if he could hurt me. He’d tell the Captain I was doubting the Captain’s abilities, then me that the Captain regretted me coming on the boat. We both ignored him. He accused us of having a “weird, sick, older man, little girl relationship.” We ignored him. “This is what I do, I fuck with people’s heads,” he told me one night. “I’m very good at it. You’ll never even be able to pinpoint what it is I’m doing, you’ll just feel like shit about yourself and then I can control you.” Even he was unraveling. Admitting his methods. I felt nauseous and cried often. The storm heaved and pushed us on.
Then one evening, while explaining nerve regeneration to the Captain as he wrestled the wheel, the wind simply dropped away. The Captain pointed, and I saw a pod of dolphins had surrounded us, jumping four abroad beside the boat, out of the dark, choppy water. I gasped and dashed to the side to reach my arms towards them.
You think you’re alone. And then.
Their bellies iridescent turquoise under the dark water, and they jumped and they jumped, the ocean parting with little pleasure hisses as they leapt up—to me, not to me, to the sky. I was delighted and shy also. I didn’t know how to talk to them. They raced beside us and smiled at me anyway.
At the helm, the captain had rigged the spinning wheel steady with ropes, and he and my One were eating fried bread with peanut butter and jelly, as the ocean around us went crashing on and on and on. Here we are together I thought suddenly. Hating each other, loving each other, fearing each other as we drank tea and ate bread and talked and laughed anyway. The Captain brought a cup of tea to where I sat at the edge of the boat. His hand, and then my own, automatically adjusting the angle of the cup to keep the liquid from spilling. We just do that. Our hand just knows how to do that.
And I thought, maybe this is the only thing I need to learn in this lifetime. Not how to be an artist, not how to make anything of myself, neither to fall in love, have children, get married. But rather simply how to eat and drink and laugh when the world is shaking and shows no sign of stopping. How to take comfort in the things you have, even if it’s only your hand’s inherent intelligence, which saves you, again and again, from pouring scalding liquid into your own lap.
I draped one arm over the boat and let the sea wrap itself around me. Her depth endless. The dolphins untouchable and everywhere close, watching. I begged them to stay, but when they felt like leaving, they did. And I felt terror for my utter and complete lack of control. And such sweet relief for the exact same reason.
At last, the hazed line of something solid appeared on the horizon. My One stood at my shoulder as we sailed toward that green coastline. There had been some lulls of peace in the last days, but sometime earlier that morning he had flipped again, and had been following me around the boat all day like my own personal demon, whispering my blackest fears as he waited for me to break.
“You know that it was you who destroyed our relationship, don’t you?” He was smiling a soft, condescending smile. His once-beautiful eyes now looked sick and terrifying as he stared at me with false sympathy. “I’m so sorry for you that you do this.”
I looked away with a shudder, out at the lit blue water of the bay, flat in the morning sun. I was still as scared as I was in that storm. Like if I couldn’t make things work with him, I wouldn’t be able to make things work with anyone. That I would never trust anyone, or love anyone again. My mind told me such thoughts were ludicrous, but at the sound of his words my body felt all the sensations of panic all the same. And what could I do? The body is a boat we can only escape from at the very end. The only remedy for feeling is to feel more. So I cried and stared at the water and waited for the Captain to take us into land.
And when we did—nosing gently into the dock—I leapt to her and ran on gooey legs, to collapse under the pine trees and press my ear to the ground; the great, quiet, unchanging mass of her. Whispering, Thank God that this, too, is here. The ground.
The captain hugged me brusquely goodbye in the doorway to his cabin, and then, again, pulling me closer, he kissed my cheek. “No one knows what any of this living is and so we just try to fill it,” he said in my ear. He nodded his chin at my One, who was waiting for me on the prow in the spotty afternoon sunshine. “And then what happens? We get all this crap between the Love and Us.”
I nodded. “Thank you. For taking me out there.”
He squeezed my hand in his giant, weathered one. “Where will you go now?”
“I don’t know. North Carolina, I guess.”
“Can I sail there?”
“Yeah.”
“Then I’ll see you again.”
My One carried my bag from the boat to the cab, huffing with the weight, and then, crashing it down at my feet he said, “In the story you write about this you’ll have to include the symbo
lism of me carrying that bag for you, Princess.”
So here it is: You’re so vain.
But it will be a while before I know that this whole song is not about you.
It will be a while before he will stop calling me. He will leave me messages, “Last night I slept with another woman. I wasn’t drunk and I don’t regret it. She wasn’t a princess like you. She made me feel good like you never could.”
It will be a while before I stop crying every night over my lost dance opportunity in Israel, my poor judgment in all matters romantic, and anything else I can dig up in the moment to feel helpless about. The state of the economy. The amount of sociopaths in high government offices.
It will be a while, but eventually I do, drive myself across the country and find myself a house, begin work, and continue on with my dancing. And sooner than I am ready for it, and definitely when I have given up looking, I meet another One.
And we’re sitting together in a seaside bar in the evening eating Reubens stacked fist high with meat when he says, “But what happens if you’re not The One?”
We’d been discussing moving in together. I pause with open mouth, sandwich halfway there.
He tells me about a moment in childhood, when he cried in his bed alone after realizing that the sun would eventually explode and consume the Earth; that our existence here was a humble one, a short-term one, and an Unknown-Why one. “What’s the POINT?” his six-year-old brain lamented, and this question was the same he revisited upon meeting me. “I love you, of course, but if you’re not THE one—my life partner, the one I’ll raise my children with, buy those forty acres with, grow old happy with—what’s the point of being together at all?”
We both stop eating for a while to think about that.
