by Stefan Mani
For fuck’s sake!
Methúsalem Sigurðsson stands up, opens the can and takes a long, cold foamy sip.
Big John looks at the clock in the engine room and sees that it’s ten to twelve.
He’s off at midnight but he can’t be bothered to hang around for even a minute longer.
‘Fuck it,’ he says as he turns off the dead man’s alarm then gets out of his chair, puts on his earmuffs and walks out the door at the front of the control booth.
From there he walks directly to the stairs leading down to the floor in front of the main engine. He’ll walk once around the engine before he goes up to bed, give it a pat, tap the meters and listen for unexpected noises.
As he walks past the engine on the port side he is aware of movement up on the metal platform on the starboard side of the space, in front of the generators.
It’s the shadow of a man who’s sneaking along the wall.
‘Who’s there?’ John calls out, but his words are swallowed by the noise of the engines and the shadow disappears into the shadows behind the control booth.
That was a man, wasn’t it?
‘What the hell!’ says John, striding behind the machine and up the stairs that lead up to the iron platform.
Nobody has any business in the engine room except the two engineers, and if that is Stoker, John wants to know what he’s doing there outside his work time.
If it isn’t Stoker then the chief engineer really wants to know what that person is doing wandering around there, and at this time of night.
‘Hello!’ John calls out when he reaches the place where the shadow disappeared just ten, fifteen seconds ago, but there’s not a soul to be seen there on the platform between the storeroom and the control booth.
Had he been seeing things? Is the engine room haunted?
‘If there’s a ghost in here …’ John shouts, shaking his fist at nothing in particular, ‘then he’d better …’
John stops talking as he steps on something that crumbles under the coarse soles of his shoes. He takes a step back, bends down and sticks his right forefinger into white sand or powder that’s drifting down through the metal grid and disappearing into the oily dark below.
What’s this? Salt?
He smells the coarse, pale substance but it seems to have no smell. John decides to stick his tongue in it.
If it’s some kind of poison he’ll just spit it out and rinse his mouth.
‘I’ll be damned,’ the chief engineer mutters after carefully tasting the coarse grains. ‘Sugar!’
At two minutes before midnight Rúnar opens the door to his cabin on C-deck and steps into the corridor.
‘Who’s there?’ asks Big John, who is halfway up the stairs from C-deck to B-deck.
‘It’s me, Rúnar,’ he answers, closing the door behind him. ‘Who are you looking for?’
‘Did you see anyone going up?’ asks John as he reaches C-deck. He’s red faced, sweaty and out of breath.
‘No. Like who?’
‘Nobody,’ says John and he stops to catch his breath. ‘I thought I saw somebody down in the engine room. But I was probably just seeing things.’
‘Have you started seeing ghosts?’ asks Rúnar with a grin.
‘I expect so. Don’t we sailors all get more or less screwed up eventually?’
‘Yeah, maybe.’ Rúnar shakes a cigarette out of its pack. ‘Are you on your way up?’
‘Yes and no. I’m on my way to bed, but I need clean linen.’
‘I’m on my way up to the bridge,’ say Rúnar, lighting his cigarette. ‘See you in the morning, then.’
‘Yeah, okay.’ John scratches his head. ‘Is Methúsalem on the watch?’
‘Yeah,’ says Rúnar, blowing smoke through his nose.
‘Yeah, right.’ John shrugs. ‘Just say hello from me, or something. Just keep an eye on him.’
‘Will do,’ says Rúnar, then he sets off up the stairs while John goes back down to A-deck to get clean bedding.
When Rúnar enters the bridge he sees no-one else up there – not Methúsalem nor anyone else.
‘HELLO!’ he calls.
Silence.
‘What’s all the noise?’ asks Methúsalem as he turns around in the captain’s chair with a huge grin on his face and his hands hanging limply from the arms of the chair.
He is so pale that his face is nearly incandescent in the dim light, and from a certain distance the Ray-Ban lenses look like black holes.
‘Christ but you startled me, man!’ says Rúnar with a snort. ‘I thought you were a phantom!’
‘A phantom?’ says Methúsalem, his grin disappearing.
‘What are you doing with those fucking glasses?’ asks Rúnar, knocking ash off his cigarette. ‘And what’s that running down your face?’
‘Eh? What?’ asks Methúsalem, wiping a milky substance off his forehead. ‘That’s just sweat. I’ve got some virus or something. My eyes sting.’
‘You weren’t down in the engine room just now, were you?’ asks Rúnar, hiding an impish grin by taking a drag on his smoke.
‘Me? Down in the engine room? No! Why?’ asks Methúsalem, his jaw hanging like that of a corpse before its ablution.
‘Because,’ says Rúnar, ‘John thought he’d seen a dead man down there.’
XXVI
Sunday, 16 September
It is four minutes to 1 p.m. when Guðmundur opens the starboard bridge wing door and goes out into the storm, wearing a raincoat and a knitted cap. He squints through the salt spray, steadies himself with his left hand on the waist-high iron rail and feels his way along to the edge of the bridge wing with a half-century-old sextant under his right arm.
Guðmundur takes up a position farthest out on the bridge wing, spreads his legs to steady himself and leans against the iron railing while he aims the sextant. The sun’s rays have penetrated the cloud cover off and on during the last hour, and if the captain isn’t mistaken the sun is about to reach its zenith – which means noon, no matter what a man-made clock may say.
The ship dances crazily over the rough seas and Guðmundur finds it almost impossible to aim the sextant. He has to guess where the horizon divides itself from the threatening waves, and it’s impossible to see the sun at the moment, but the minute its rays find a path through the darkness the captain will try to read the height of this fire-breathing mother of all life.
Stiff fingers handle the precise and finely adjusted instrument, and middle-aged eyes try to maintain focus and concentration. Guðmundur Berndsen has only calculated the height of the sun with a sextant on one sea voyage since he passed the exam on its use, in beautiful weather on the balcony of the College of Navigation more than three decades ago, and he’s been trying to forget that voyage for thirty years.
Bloody hell, this simply isn’t possible!
But he has to succeed. The longer the captain has no idea where the ship is, the sooner his underlings will lose faith in his ability to get the ship safely to Suriname.
The captain narrows his right eye and looks with his left through the little telescope on the back of the sextant. He peers through a slanting half-mirror and circular sight on the front of the instrument. The horizon divides the middle of the sight while the mirror at the top of the instrument reflects the rays of the sun, stars or moon through a coloured glass, down to the half-mirror and then to the eye of the user – that is, if the conditions are right. What the user has to do to find the height of the moon or sun is to keep the horizon steady in the sight and move the graduated arc at the bottom of the instrument, until the light is reflected from one mirror to the other and reaches his eye. Then all he has to do is secure the graduated arc and read from it the number that the pointer on the vertical part of the instrument indicates.
Technically this is a very easy thing to do, but at the same time it is complicated and difficult, especially at sea.
‘Come on, then!’
At seven minutes after one o’clock, two and th
en three strong rays of the sun appear to the south. The captain tries to make up for the motion of the ship by stretching out his legs and bending them alternately. He holds his breath and manages to concentrate long enough to estimate with some accuracy the height of the sun over the horizon, before he loses his balance and rams into the iron wall and falls on his backside, grasping the sextant like a fragile work of art.
This sextant is a fragile work of art and, as things now stand, worth more than a thousand times its weight in gold. All the satellites of the world are little more than dusty electronic junk compared to this classical invention that has the lustre of scientific aesthetics, man’s desire for truth and his unshakable faith in the reliability of God’s creation.
A mere instrument on land; the breath of life at sea.
Guðmundur scrambles to his feet, with the sextant in his arms, and manages to get it into the bridge, where he places it on the desk in the chart room without disturbing the adjustment.
But the desk is empty. No charts.
‘Of course,’ Guðmundur says under his breath. For a moment he thinks someone has stolen all the charts, then remembers he removed them himself – rolled them up and hid them in the wardrobe in his cabin.
He had meant to make sure that no irresponsible person got hold of them and then sailed the ship somewhere other than was intended. When he became aware of the mutiny of the gang of five he didn’t know what they were up to, and automatically thought the worst.
Guðmundur finds the walky-talky, turns it on and adjusts it to an open channel.
‘Rúnar, can you hear me? It’s the captain calling,’ Guðmundur says into the transmitter. ‘Rúnar, can you hear me?’
Skuggi lifts his head off the floor and looks at the captain. Crackling sounds are heard from the receiver.
‘Rúnar here. Over.’
‘Will you get Methúsalem to relieve me? I’m going to calculate the position of the ship. Over.’
‘Give me two minutes. Over and out.’
Rúnar hangs up his overalls in the storeroom and saunters up to E-deck, a lit cigarette between his lips.
‘Methúsalem?’ he calls and knocks on the door of the first mate’s cabin.
No answer.
‘Methúsalem!’
The bosun grabs the doorknob and opens the door with his left hand as he knocks politely with his right.
‘Methúsalem! Are you there?’
The first mate must be in the cabin, because the hasp prevents the door from opening more than a few centimetres.
‘Methúsalem? You asleep?’ Rúnar knocks again on the door, which rattles against the hasp.
No answer.
It is pitch black in the first mate’s cabin and a strange smell floats into the corridor, a sort of mixture of mould, bad breath and strong body odour.
The bosun drags on his cigarette, grimaces, and then blows the smoke through his nose.
‘Methúsalem!’
Still no answer.
‘To hell with you then,’ the bosun says and slams the door.
Rúnar draws on the cigarette until it’s burned up to the filter before throwing the stub out the door behind the wheelhouse up on F-deck, then he shuts out the storm and saunters on up to G-deck.
‘Where’s Methúsalem?’ Guðmundur asks when Rúnar enters the bridge.
‘He didn’t answer,’ says Rúnar as makes his way to the port side and pours a mug of coffee.
‘Wasn’t he in his cabin?’
‘Yeah, the hasp was in place. He’s just fast asleep. Unless he’s ill or something. There’s a bloody stench in the cabin.’
‘He wasn’t feeling too good yesterday,’ mumbles Guðmundur.
‘Yeah, that’s right. He’s probably got some kind of bug.’
‘Damn it!’ Guðmundur shakes his head. ‘It’s hard enough to man the watch as it is.’
‘I can relieve you for a while,’ says Rúnar, grabbing a handle with his left hand as the ship rolls to starboard. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘I’m heading down to my cabin to calculate our position,’ Guðmundur answers, picking up the sextant as if it were an infant. ‘The charts and calculator are below. I won’t be long.’
‘Take your time,’ says Rúnar as he gets into the captain’s chair. ‘I was thinking of taking him some food to the forecastle.’
‘Doesn’t the man have any food?’.
‘No. But we left him some water.’
‘That’ll have to do for now. There’s no way I’m letting men risk their lives outside when the weather like this.’
‘I see,’ Rúnar says into his coffee.
‘We’ll look into it this evening,’ says the captain as he opens the door into the corridor. Skuggi stands up.
‘Are you okay with that?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Good. I’ll be back in a few minutes.’
The captain leaves the bridge with Skuggi at his heels.
Methúsalem?
Methúsalem!
Who is Methúsalem?
Is he the man who drove to a party and drank maybe one glass of white wine to be polite, and then another, and another, but still just one glass – the same glass – over and over again, and then drove home to prove to himself that he wasn’t drunk, since he’d been sober for five weeks, four, three, two …?
No! Who’d want to talk to him?
Methúsalem is me.
Me? Yes! Who am I?
The first mate of death!
Death? What rubbish!
Knock, knock, knock …
Come in!
I mean …
Methúsalem Sigurdsson opens his mouth but no words come out.
Is it possible to be so hung over from one beer? The beer was just a pick-me-up. One beer. He was sober when he drank it, there’s no doubt about that, see!
The beer must have gone off. How long had it been hidden in the refrigerator? A year? Two? Ten?
‘Methúsalem!’
The first mate lies on his back in the hot dark and hears someone call from a vague distance.
A black skull speaks through a faint yellow light that sneaks in like fog through the doorway that opens beyond a dark room full of nothing.
Is he dreaming? Or is someone knocking on the door? On what door? The door to his head? Is there a door in his head?
Where is he? Outside his head? Is he knocking? Or has he got the DTs?
‘To hell with you then.’
The door slams shut, the skull disappears and the furry darkness is filled with a feverish silence.
‘Hello?’ Methúsalem says, making a feeble effort to clear his throat. He is hoarse and tries to wet his parched lips with his swollen tongue.
No answer. Who should answer him? Is his head empty? Nobody home?
Shut up!
He means to open his eyes but nothing happens. He can’t open his eyes.
They are glued shut.
‘What the hell,’ he says and feels his closed eyes with the fingers of his right hand. On his eyelashes he finds some kind of crust or something congealed that can be picked at and pulled off his slimy lashes and crumbled like bits of cake between his fingers.
His eyes are burning, he is nauseated and his nose is stuffed.
‘Goddammit,’ mutters Methúsalem and stops picking at the crust that glues his eyes closed.
He’s come down with some fucking bug.
A virus.
There was no way he could have been so hung over!
Better sleep a bit longer. Restore his energy. Get better. It’s hardly all that late.
What did he do yesterday? Who? Did he do anything yesterday? What?
The engine!
Did he go down to the engine room? Or didn’t he?
Methúsalem puts the palm of his right hand on the bed frame. Through the wood and steel the tips of his fingers sense the slow beat of the engine.
So, had he not gone down to the engine room?
He sighs deep
ly and tries to fall asleep again, but he feels lousy and it’s hard to relax when your thoughts wander across the border between dreaming and being awake, while your stomach is heaving like a bubbling mud pot.
His fingers meet a white cube …
Suddenly he remembers something. He makes his right hand crawl like a large spider into the pocket of his trousers, and when his trembling fingers finally find a hard cube his heart skips a beat, and then starts pounding in his chest like a rabbit fucking.
A lump of sugar!
The darkness buzzes like a huge bluebottle fly, the veins in his eyelids light up like the wires in a light bulb and the heat in the cabin seems to rise about twenty degrees.
‘Shit!’ Methúsalem tries to swallow, his mouth is bone dry.
This can’t be right!
Guðmundur Berndsen sits at the table in his cabin and stares in disbelief at the chart laid out in front of him, where two lines intersect like a cross far from their intended route:
33° W 7° N
He could accept thirty-three degrees west, which is the longitudinal coordinate. Guðmundur was hoping the ship was closer to thirty-seven degrees west, though drifting about four degrees east was of itself not impossible, though it is much more than all the models project.
But seven degrees north? That’s simply not possible.
By normal standards the ship should be east-south-east of Newfoundland, somewhere nearer forty-four degrees north latitude. But according to his calculation the ship was positioned north-north-east of Brazil.
Seven degrees north of the equator.
South of the Tropic of Cancer.
The ship is right over the curved Atlantic Ridge, as if it had skimmed along it at three times its top speed.
‘This can’t be right,’ Guðmundur mutters to himself.
But what if it is right? Can it be right? No, this simply can not be right!
Or can it?
If these coordinates are right he needs to change course and sail west to Suriname, which is only three days away if these figures are to be believed.
If the figures are sheer bullshit, though, and he accepts them and sails to the west, he could end up in New York after three days instead of continuing on to South America.
