The Ship

by Stefan Mani

  The night of the living dead …

  But he does it in the end. Cold and wet, he crawls under the sweaty doona, curls up in the foetal position and waits for the shivering, the biting cold in his nails and the muscle twitching to pass, and the extra-strong painkillers to kick in. The cold is a comfort but it only reduces the hellish pain to a certain point.

  ‘Come on, then.’

  His tongue swells, his lips go dry and a woolly drug fog fills his head …

  He had felt tolerable after that long sleep or unconsciousness or whatever, at least while he sat and did nothing, but the second mate’s visit had tired him more than three hours of heavy lifting would. While flesh, bones and sinews are healing there’s no energy left over. You can’t do anything but rest, gather strength and wait for the green light from your body’s Department of Restoration.

  Breathe and wait.

  A million, trillion seconds in an itchy woollen cloud …

  Lightning tears through the dark like a crackling electric sword cleaving the inner heavens of the skull.

  Silence.

  And the thunder rattles flesh and bones, growls and kicks the steel like a ragamuffin who spots a tin can in the gutter.

  Another silence.

  The ship hovers in the air, just for a moment … before it crashes down on the heavy wave.

  Boom, boom, boom …

  Jón Karl jumps, opens his eyes and sees nothing.

  ‘STOP!’

  He sits up in bed, clenches his fists and stares into the darkness while his heart pounds in his chest and his lungs pump foul air in and out of his flaring nostrils.

  ‘Stop,’ he mutters hoarsely, exhales like a dying man and falls back down on the sweat-soaked pillow.

  Down into a pitch-black woolly cloud …

  The lights are on, the window half open and Jón Karl has dressed in trousers, socks and a T-shirt. He sits on the couch with a lit cigarette clamped between his lips, the revolver in his hands and a glint in his eye.

  He double-checks all the gun’s movable parts, then pushes the cylinder to the side and empties it. Two empty shells and three whole ones fall onto the tabletop. He rubs soot away with his fingers, blows powder grains out of the barrel and reloads the gun, leaving eight whole shells.

  ‘Speak softly and carry a big gun,’ Jón Karl says to himself as he slides the gun into its holster.

  The eight shells he drops into a sock which he then rolls up and slides into the left pocket of his trousers.

  He places the ruined passports, the bank books and the stock and share certificates in the bottom of his duffel bag and arranges his clothes on top of them.

  He laces up his army boots, straps the handgun to the upper part of the right boot, sticks his sheathed hunting knife into the left boot and hides the weapons with his trouser legs. Óðin had slit the left leg but Jón Karl found a needle and thread in the first aid kit and sewed it back together. He stands up, tosses his cigarette out of the window and throws the bag into the wardrobe. The open pack of cigarettes goes in his right trouser pocket, along with the matchbook containing one unused match, then he puts the eight unopened packs in the bathroom cabinet.

  He closes the cabinet door and looks himself in the eye in its mirror.

  ‘Rock ’n’ roll,’ says Jón Karl, forcing a smile as he runs his fingers through his greasy tangles, then he winks at himself before turning off the bathroom light.

  He takes one turn round, intently scanning the cabin, catches sight of the empty shells and tosses them, like the cigarette butt, out the window. Then he closes the window and turns off all the lights before opening the door and, for the first time, leaves this simple room that is neither a prison cell nor a hotel room, and least of all a home of any kind, yet some combination of all three.

  A cabin.

  On his way to the bridge he runs across that Rúnar who picked him up in the Jeep and brought him aboard the ship. Rúnar is coming out of one of the E-deck cabins, holding a dismantled shotgun. He’s nervous and jumpy when he sees Jón Karl, who is experienced enough to know when to act as if you haven’t noticed something someone else clearly doesn’t want you to see.

  ‘What? … Who?’ says Rúnar, backing against the closed cabin door and trying to hide the gun behind his back.

  ‘Evening,’ says Jón Karl expressionlessly and then carries on climbing the steep stairs.

  Just as well to be armed and ready for anything on this bloody ship, where men sneak around with dismantled guns when they think no-one’s looking.

  Jón Karl doesn’t spend much thought on the bosun’s skulking, though. He expects others not to concern themselves with him and what he’s up to – whether under the cover of darkness or not – so he doesn’t concern himself with others, as long as they keep themselves to themselves and don’t mess with him.

  At the top of the stairwell, up on G-deck, there are three doors. Directly ahead is a door with a window, leading to the landing of the iron steps on the outside of the wheelhouse; at the back, on the right, is the toilet and on the left is the door to the bridge.

  Before opening the door to the bridge, Jón Karl steps out onto the landing behind the wheelhouse. Wide eyed, he looks over the edge of a swaying cliff and lets the wind and rain refresh him. The sea is deeply dark and rough, boiling and churning behind the stern, and in the distance lightning illuminates the black-clouded darkness, oppressive in its immensity. Jón Karl’s legs shift under him, so he teeters and grabs an ice-cold iron rod to keep from falling, and then backs through the door and shuts the howl of the wind outside.

  In the bridge there’s not a soul to be seen. He hears nothing but the low clicks in some instruments and the creaking of the fittings. If it weren’t for the yellow-and-green lights in the navigation instruments, he may just as well have been on a ghost ship.

  ‘Hello?’ calls Jón Karl, walking past the map room on the starboard side and in to the centre of the bridge, where an empty captain’s chair on a high swivel foot moves slightly back and forth with the rolling of the ship.

  No answer.

  ‘Jónas?’

  ‘Jónas doesn’t come on till three o’clock,’ says a voice behind Jón Karl; the door closes with a soft click. ‘And you’re not supposed to come until four.’

  Jón Karl turns to look searchingly at the chief mate, who returns the stare with suspicion.

  ‘What time is it now?’

  ‘Twenty-five to one,’ says Methúsalem, looking at his watch. He walks quickly past Jón Karl and clocks in on the dead man’s bell, a simple device about the size of a garage door opener.

  Not good having no watch …

  ‘Yeah, okay … I’ll just go and …’ says Jón Karl, but he stops talking when his legs start to give way under him. His eyes roll up and he reaches out to grasp something to keep his body from falling.

  ‘What the hell!’ Methúsalem charges across and grabs Jón Karl in his arms before he falls flat on his face. Jón Karl clutches the chief mate’s arm, then he lays his head and shoulders against the chief mate’s chest, draws a deep breath and manages to regain his feet.

  ‘Are you …?’ asks Methúsalem, loosening his hold a little.

  ‘I’m … fine,’ says Jón Karl and calmly stands up without, however, immediately letting go of the chief mate’s arm. ‘I can’t think what …’

  ‘I expect you’ll recover,’ says Methúsalem dryly, loosening his arm from the seaman’s grip. ‘Just go lie down until your watch.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ll do that.’ Jón Karl takes a deep breath. ‘It’s just seasickness or something.’

  ‘No sea legs,’ mutters the chief mate, opening the door for Jón Karl and waiting for him to leave the bridge. ‘You’ll get used to it,’ he says more loudly. ‘Good night.’

  ‘Yeah, sure.’ Jón Karl smiles weakly.

  Methúsalem shakes his head as he closes the door behind the seaman, who is still unsteady on his feet and grasps the railing with both hands as he walks
backwards down the steep staircase.

  ‘Fool!’ says Jón Karl down on F-deck, laughing quietly. He pulls the chief mate’s gold watch out of his waistband, slaps the strap around his left wrist and examines the diamond-studded white-gold dial before he continues on his way.

  Rolex. Not bad. But he prefers Breitling himself.

  On D-deck he stops and deliberates about what to do: carry on all the way down to the kitchen on B-deck and see whether he finds anything edible, or return to his cabin and sleep until his watch comes up.

  But before Jón Karl can choose one of these options, an unexpected third turns up. Through the doorway of a cabin on the starboard side wafts a faint aroma that makes Jón Karl forget both hunger and fatigue. It’s the sweet, heavy spicy smell of first-class oil of hashish that somebody is mixing with tobacco.

  The third option is this: should he knock on the cabin door and refuse to leave until the occupant shares some of this, the strongest product from cannabis sativa, the one and only hashish plant?

  Yes!

  Jón Karl knocks on the door – three soft blows with a bent forefinger.

  No answer.

  So he knocks again – three determined blows with two bent fingers.

  Then three with a clenched fist.

  Then finally there’s an answer.

  The door opens a tiny crack and half the face of the first engineer appears in it.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Let me in,’ says Jón Karl with the voice and attitude of a man who knows what he wants and isn’t about to listen to any objections. ‘I’m going to join you in a pipe.’

  XIV

  ‘Nobody ever comes in here,’ says Stoker as he lets Jón Karl in to the dimly lit room, which is a mirror image of the cabin on the port side.

  ‘Right,’ Jón Karl says curtly, taking a good look at this wretched shipmate of his who is dark, skinny and hairy, with a lump on his back and a bald spot on the back of his head, and all shiny with grease – his own and the ship’s. He stinks like a dog, is quick and antsy in his movements, and seems to be wearing nothing but a brown bathrobe. In his earlobes are holes but no rings, and through his smelly beard Jón Karl can just see an irritating skeleton grin and, above that, nervous raven eyes.

  ‘You’re like some homeless halfwit!’ says Jón Karl, wrinkling his nose. ‘What do you think you gain by looking and smelling like a beggar?’

  ‘I’ve got other things to think about,’ growls Stoker, looking sideways at Jón Karl like an abused dog at a new master. ‘You’d be the new guy.’

  ‘Or something.’

  Jón Karl looks around the cabin. On the table he sees dozens of books – some open, all with notes or clippings sticking out of them every which way. There are various small objects in amongst the books, including a hashish pipe, but the most remarkable thing is a black tin canister full of black candles and candle ends. Its lid is in the middle of the table with five black candles burning on it, stuck on with blobs of melted black wax.

  These flickering candle flames are the only source of light in Stoker’s cabin.

  On the unmade bed is an old, worn leather case full of books, magazines and odd bits of paper, and above the bed hangs a picture which provides the only decoration in the cabin. It’s an elaborate pencil drawing that has an old-fashioned look about it, framed with thick matting and a carved wooden frame. The drawing is a portrait of some kind of monster or being that is also a man. It is dressed in the clothes of an upper-class Victorian but the head is like an octopus: bald, with neither nose nor mouth but wearing a long beard that resembles soft tentacles. The small black eyes look without doubt or fear into the eyes of the viewer, who can’t help but admire the arrogant demeanour of this aberration that crosses its arms in the manner of a dictator and isn’t the least ashamed either of its ridiculous head or the misshapen hands like long seal’s flippers that hang out of its sleeves.

  ‘Kutulu, king of the underworld,’ says Stoker, rubbing his hands. ‘He who doesn’t live, yet dreams.’

  ‘Who?’ asks Jón Karl, tearing his eyes from the picture.

  ‘Bought it on the internet,’ says Stoker with a secretive expression, pointing towards the picture. ‘A priceless treasure which the civilised world doesn’t actually appreciate.’

  ‘No. Quite,’ murmurs Jón Karl and sits on the couch.

  A priceless treasure? Did he mean the picture or the degenerate subject of it? Is it meant to be some famous elephant man? If there’s one thing Jón Karl can’t stand, it’s innuendo. If people have something to say, they should say it or keep quiet.

  ‘The only true mercy of creation, to my mind, is the inability of the human mind to see and understand the big picture,’ says Stoker, waxing profound in the presence of this stranger. ‘We live on the peaceful island of ignorance in the middle of the ocean of the darkness of eternity, and we were never meant to leave our birthplace. The sciences, fumbling about in different corners, have not yet caused us harm, but one day some shreds, some fractions of knowledge, seen as a disparate collection until that moment, will come together in a new and unexpected way, revealing a horrifying reality that will either madden us or drive us from the true light and into a period of rejection, stupidity and stagnation that could be called the new Dark Ages.’

  ‘I came in here to smoke a pipe,’ says Jón Karl, irritated. ‘Not to listen to a lecture on the vastness of your granny’s underpants.’

  ‘So you smoke,’ Stoker says with a foolish grin.

  ‘Wouldn’t be here otherwise,’ says Jón Karl with a bored yawn. ‘It’s not as if I want to get to know a crackpot like you, understand?’

  ‘I don’t have any need for friends.’ Stoker takes off his ragged bathrobe and tosses it on the bed. Underneath he is wearing grey cotton trousers cut off just above the knee to form sloppy-looking shorts. ‘In fact, I make a point of keeping human company away from me and my personal space.’

  ‘I see,’ says Jón Karl, staring at the hairy, bony excuse for a body he’s faced with in the dim light of the candles.

  The stomach is sunken and distorted by a Y-shaped scar that pulls it together into an awful knot; Stoker’s chest is virtually fleshless and his thin arms are covered with homemade tattoos – mostly upside-down crosses, five-pointed stars and letters or calculations – and in amongst the tattoos are raised scars from cuts or some kind of branding.

  ‘I do that with a red-hot wire,’ says Stoker with a victorious grin when he notices his guest’s interest in this hellish body art. He stretches out his left arm to show Jón Karl a brand reaching from his left chest down to his wrist. It’s a sentence that appears to have been burned again and again into the meagre flesh.

  That which sleeps forever is not dead.

  The letters, some of which are backwards or upside down, are highly ridged, some pink, some fiery red.

  ‘Do you do that in front of a mirror?’ Jón Karl asks, smiling crookedly.

  ‘Yeah,’ says Stoker as he sits down at the table, lifts an open book from a paper of hash oil, a pocketknife and tobacco in burned foil. ‘Face to face with …’

  He goes silent, clears his throat and looks at Jón Karl with his skull-like grin frozen on his face like a grimace.

  ‘You’re welcome to dance naked with the devil every night as far as I’m concerned,’ says Jón Karl, taking a deep breath as he pulls over a black gas lighter and sneaks it into his left pocket. ‘I couldn’t care less.’

  ‘They call me Stoker,’ says Stoker. He scrapes a bit of the thick hash oil from the wax paper it’s stuck to. ‘They say I shovel coal for Satan and no one else.’

  ‘Some would say that shovelling is a waste of time,’ says Jón Karl with a low laugh. ‘At any rate, I reckon that old guy doesn’t pay well – if he exists, that is.’

  ‘Satan exists, both as a shadow or inversion of the godly in the world view of Christians, but above all as a spiritual archetype in the society of men,’ says Stoker as he ignites a gas lighter under
the knife and melts the oil from its tip onto the tobacco. ‘Satan is a dependable companion and a fun guy, but he is neither the beginning nor the end of the diabolical chaos at work behind the weak stage set that humankind is dancing on.’

  ‘You’re no different from any other Bible-basher!’ says Jón Karl, laughing in Stoker’s face. ‘You’ve just turned everything upside down, that’s all. The same self-righteousness, the same dogma, the same empty expression, the same arrogant tone, the same idiotic conviction of your own safety and everyone else’s certain death.’

  ‘What you don’t understand —’ Stoker begins, putting down the lighter and knife.

  ‘What I know and understand is that life has no real purpose and there is nothing once it ends,’ Jón Karl says forcefully. ‘Good and evil are just ideas, God and the devil don’t exist – the stage set is all there is. There’s nothing behind it … nothing! Not even darkness or death.’

  ‘Good, good,’ says Stoker, smiling like a teacher who purposely challenges his pupil in order to get him to express himself. ‘But can nothingness flourish without existence? Is it technically possible for some nothing to take over from some thing that is without at the same time gaining existence – that is, becoming something?’

  ‘I can’t be bothered to argue with people who …’ Jón Karl trails off, pushing aside some books in English, German and French whose hard covers have been torn off. ‘With people who have nothing better to do than read fucking books!’ he finishes.

  ‘Nothing, or that which is not, can only flourish as the shadow of something that is,’ says Stoker as he starts to heat up the tobacco over one of the flames. ‘If something which is disappears, that doesn’t mean that something that is not takes over, but that the nothing disappears at the same time. Nothingness only exists as a phenomenon without independence on the surface of, or in the shadow of, existence.’