I nodded.
Johnson came and sat and ate the fish with a silver fork, one hand in his lap.
“McGlue,” I told him.
He gave me his hand again.
Fag unlocks the door hours later. It’s turned grey, early evening. He’s wearing a funny green sweater. He leaves a crate of oranges on the dropped-down, then comes and stands over me. I fold my hands.
“Captain says to give you food. There’s some oranges. I’ll send you down a plate later. And I guess some ale. But captain said no more rum. You’ve got a big hole in your head, McGlue.”
I touch the crack with my finger. My ears ring. I wake up more, it’s like a bright, sunny day and nowhere to go. All the more rum I’ll need, I think.
“You need to go, you go here,” he says, going back out to the hall and carrying in a big tin bucket. He sets it carefully by the bed.
“Many thanks, faggot,” I say. “Throw me an orange.”
He selects one and tosses it softly into my open palms. Nice little fag, I think. Good boy, I’m thinking, watching him leave and lock the door. I pierce the dimpled orange peel with my thickened, yellow thumbnail. The perfume rouses the hairs in my nose, making my eyes water. I sniff deep. My head fills with the sour spray, scratching an itch deep in my brain. It’s good. I take a bite, peel and all. It’s not good. This is me now: puking fruit into a bucket already half full of blackie piss and shit.
I lay back down and close my eyes. Soon there will be hot food. The thought makes my stomach turn. A mug of cold ale more like it. I’ll sleep till then, think of Shanghai. The so-often swept and scoured plaza. The great clock. The perfect skin of the girl. No variation. You could paint her in three colors: yellow, black and red.
Fag wakes me in the dark with a cold plate of hash and digs a fork into my fist. “No ale,” he says. “Captain’s orders.” Still just remembering my name, what man I am, I sit up in my cot and eat as best I can.
South Pacific, a month later
I’ve been studying a Walch’s Tasmanian almanac, memorizing pages, not to let my mind-muscle go to flub like my arms and legs have after almost a month, I guess, of lying down here, imprisoned. Sometimes when I look down, a less-thinking part of me looks up at the shapes and curves of my flesh and bone which have taken on a kind of pale and pretty shiftiness, like a young country girl in winter. I lift the sheets and stare and stare. Well, it’s a good game to play when I’m too bored to think. My mind wanders watching it rise and tarry. If they give me food in the morning and it’s not too cold, I tend to pass the time aloud, sing the songs I learned in school, talk to an invisible Johnson, have a laugh or two, get some soul out. I’ve asked Saunders and Fag to provide me with some diversions. “Let me walk around the ship. You think I’ll swim away?” I say. They tell me I should be happy with what I’ve got to read — three letters raised on the blue glass bottle of O-I–L. They don’t know about the almanac. They keep saying I’ve killed Johnson.
Without Johnson around to have look-aftering, and all these mates down on me as a killer, I miss the rum. I am beginning to hear what they say I’ve done. Fag says I should lay here quietly and pray. I tell him I’m thirsty. I flip the blanket down and lift my johns.
“Fagger,” I say. “If I was thirsty, would you afford this?”
I see his eyes twitch, the fag.
“You smell like a dead horse’s ass, McGlue.” His scoff is so huffy, I laugh.
I look down at the lovely alabaster ridged cliffs and valleys of my body, scribbled with little light brown curls down into a shag of darkened, wet and heady hell. A tall mug of port would be good. I’d kiss you, I think. It makes itself known, unshies itself from the dark down there.
“Hello,” I say to it. It rises.
Fagger’s watching.
“The fag’ll have none of you then,” I say, and lick my hand.
“Fag,” I say, reaching down to it, “stay with me.”
He sees well the game I’m playing. He stays.
That evening he brings me a hogshead of ale.
The next morning, a bottle of the good stuff.
I’m good again. I don’t read the almanac as much. Hell hides in the ditch and my eyes are dry.
South Pacific
Captain comes in. He’s got on a new jet black felt hat.
“What’s worse, McGlue? You want to confess today?”
“I didn’t do it,” I say.
“And you don’t recall.”
“No recollection.”
“Show me your hands,” he says, and I stretch them out towards him best I can. They warble and drift from side to side. He steadies one between his two warm palms. Then he slaps it, hard. A naughty child. I don’t laugh.
“Word’s been sent to your mother, McGlue. You’ll be tried in Salem, most likely in the first degree. Or even second degree. The greatest degree if you want to know what I think you’re due.” That idiot. He wrenches his face and looks away and sways back on his heels and tries again to look me in the face but can’t and wrenches his face again. He resembles a drowned man: doughy-faced, unbearded, eyes bulging and colorless, veins showing clearly at his throat. “You think it’s one big gag, don’t you. Lie down here all day, do no work, think you’ve got the world in a book. Drunken trash,” he calls me. “I never saw what Johnson said you’d be any good for, and I was right. Don’t want to think what his family would have to say to you. Why would anyone? People are gonna want to know why you did it, McGlue. Better start thinking real hard. What have you been thinking all this time?”
I fold my hands and sit up a little in the cot. I just look at him like, What?
“We’ll be home in a month,” he says. He comes a bit closer and looks down at my head from above, I guess at the crack. Inspection time. On his way out he catches scent of the piss and shit bucket, and looks at the fag and cocks his chin at it, and goes out with his head down. His chin is gutty and flubbed like a fish that way. I wonder who would ever want to fuck such a man.
Things get slow down here.
There was a little Hindu man sitting cross-legged in the market in Calcutta waving a sword around his head. Johnson elbowed me at the sight of him, so we stopped and watched him put the blade down his throat, all the way till the handle was just sitting on his teeth. Some men came and the little man ran off, his head still thrown back, moving nimbly like a little lizard.
I asked Johnson how he could’ve survived such impalement.
“It’s all empty in there, Nicky,” he told me, drumming his chest. “Like a tunnel.” Then he knocked on my head. “You may be just clear of junk up here instead,” he said.
What I have been thinking, captain, is what is exempt from import tax in one country is what I’d like to stick through the crack in my skull to start to fill it: hay, oranges, lemons, pineapples, cocoa nuts, grapes, green fruit, and vegetables of every variety, and linseed oil cake. Horses, pigs, poultry, dogs, and living animals of every description, except cattle and sheep. Corks, bark, firewood, logwood, and dyewoods. Copper or yellow metal, rod bolts or sheathing, and copper and yellow metal nails. Felt for sheathing, oakum and junk, pitch, tar, and resin. Sail canvas, boats, and boat oars.
I fill my head with ships’ blocks, binnacle lamps, signal lamps, compasses, shackles, sheaves, deadeyes, rings and thimbles, dead lights, anchors, and chain cables of every description, and galvanized iron wire rope. Lime juice and ice. Printed books, music, and newspapers, maps, charts, globes, and uncut cardboard, millboard, and pasteboard. Ink, printing presses, printing type, and other printing materials. Passengers’ baggage or cabin furniture arriving in the colony at any time within three months before or after the owner thereof. Tablets, memorial windows, harmoniums, organs, bells, and clocks specially imported for churches or chapels. Hides and skins of every description, raw and unmanufactured. Veneers of all sorts. Rattans, split or unsplit.
Carriage shafts, spokes, naves, and felloes. School slates and slate pencils, slates for roofing, and sl
ates and stone for flagging. Marble, granite, slate, or stone in rough block.
Soda ash, caustic soda, and silicate of soda. Cotton waste, woollen waste, candle cotton, wool, flax, hemp, tow, and jute, unmanufactured. Specimens of natural history, mineralogy, or botany. Gold dust, gold bars, bullion, and coin. Coir bristles and hair unmanufactured. Broom heads and stocks, partly manufactured for brushmaking purposes. Jars of glass or of earthenware, specially imported for jam. Rod bar hoop sheet plate and pig iron and piglead share moulds and mould boards. Epsom salts, citric acid, sulphuric acid, muriatic acid, carbolic acid. Hair cloth for hopkilns. Wines and spirits.
Captain.
What’s true?
We stayed a night in Mamaroneck, and though I’d have liked to get out and have a run at a grog shop, Johnson said we had to get up early to ride into the city, and laid out for me a set of his old clothes across the back of a chair: heavy brown trousers, a clean shirt, vest and woolen frock coat.
“New Haven is good for two things,” said Johnson, undressing for bed. “Sam Colts and cotton gin.” I watched him from where I stood, warming myself by the fire. His arms were thin and finely wrought. Hands red and afog in what I could only think what must be beauty. “I’m done,” he said, getting into bed. “New York is full of rich people, money, and wine. You just have to learn how to not take too much or you’ll get shut down.”
I stood there with my hands in my pockets. I was thinking he was a ride somewhere and another few meals until I got there.
“Who’s the girl?” I asked him.
“An old maid,” was his answer.
I stood there some more and watched him rub his eyes in a cracked mirror on the bedside table. “What you want me here for?”
“You got a gun?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“And you haven’t shot me yet,” he said.
“No.”
He threw a blanket at the rug by the fire and rolled over.
In the morning we found that Johnson’s trousers were too long on me and he had the girl hem them while I sat in my long johns by the fire and he got the horse ready.
North Sea, south of Long Fourties
There is a storm in the night and the boat rocks. Mates clamber up and down the hall and across the deck, hollering over the wind and rain. Raise the sails, furl the sails, repair the rigging, I remember all that. I stand on the cot to look out the window, wipe my face, watch the lightning flash through the white tower of flags, whipping crazy, the bow flying high, chair scraping along the floor behind me, the black seas all around. The ship tilts and rain spills in through the window onto the cot. I get up and drag the cot up against the door. This kind of dizzy makes sense when I walk. The piss and shit bucket I wedge in the corner. I’d like a smoke. I tip the cot to get the water off and lay back down. This is like high seas. The best part. I close my eyes, let the room spin.
“If you can’t sleep, think of things you like to eat, things you see walking down a road, girls’ names. Say them in your head, again and again, until you’re done.”
“I’m never done, Johnson,” I tell him. “It’s what I always need, one more.”
“Johnson, Johnson, Johnson, Johnson…”
THE END
About the Author
Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from Boston. She was awarded the Plimpton Discovery Prize for her stories in The Paris Review, and granted a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Rivka Galchen chose McGlue for the first annual Fence Modern Prize in Prose. Moshfegh is currently a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University.
About the Guest Editor:
Fence Books is the offspring of Fence, a biannual literary journal published continuously since 1998. Fence Books has been publishing mostly poetry since 2001. Over the years, many of the most adored and adorable poets have won some of our prestigious book prizes, which are the Fence Modern Poets Series, the Motherwell Prize (now the Ottoline), the National Poetry Series (Fence participates), and the new Fence Modern Prize in Prose (McGlue is its first winner; the second will be announced by December 25, 2014). Notable authors of poetry and prose include Ariana Reines, Douglas Kearney, Aaron Kunin, Harmony Holiday, Claudia Rankine, Catherine Wagner, Joyelle McSweeney, and Clark Coolidge.
About the Publisher:
Electric Literature is an independent publisher working to ensure that literature remains a vibrant presence in popular culture. Electric Literature’s weekly fiction magazine, Recommended Reading, invites established authors, indie presses, and literary magazines to recommended great fiction. Once a month we feature our own recommendation of original, previously unpublished fiction, accompanied by a Single Sentence Animation. Single Sentence Animations are creative collaborations: the author chooses a favorite sentence and we commission an artist to interpret it. Stay connected with us through email, Facebook, and Twitter, and find previous Electric Literature picks in the Recommended Reading archives.
Table of Contents
Editor’s Note
McGlue
About the Author
McGlue Page 2
