by Lloyd Kropp
The Sargasso! That great circle of water that superstitious fishermen had feared for hundreds of years. There were so many stories about The Sargasso Sea. The old men who hung around the docks in Puerto Rico had told him that it was haunted by the ghosts of dead sailors and by the ghosts of their ships, and when he was little he had read dozens of sea stories and listened to the Sargasso Tales that sailors would tell in the summertime on calm days when the sea off the New Jersey coast was like glass: tales of sea monsters, a whirlpool that led to the bottom of the ocean, a great island of Sargasso Weeds that went down thirty feet and extended as far as the eye could see, a swampy graveyard for derelict ships.
Of course he had known all along that he was moving near its edge, but somehow the thought of it had not intruded, had not seemed relevant to his situation. Now he realized that part of his sense of expectancy, his sense of peace, was connected with The Sargasso Sea. There was a subtle change in the air. It was as if—but he could not form the thought of it in his mind. Perhaps it was only the possibility of finding food. He had once read (apart from the myths and sea stories) that crabs and eels and strange crawling fish lived amid the large mats of weeds that drifted near the center of The Sargasso. He felt an unreasonable good cheer. It was almost as if he were approaching something familiar, something that would take care of him. Perhaps, he thought ruefully this was indeed the beginning of hallucination and madness.
The next day he ran out of water, and by that afternoon hunger and thirst had dulled his senses. Only dimly did he notice that the seascape around him was beginning to change. Small patches of gulfweed floated everywhere in the water, sometimes in strange whirling eddies of current. For an hour or so he sat in a kind of stupor, half awake, thinking of his wasted life and his pointless death—a life wasted with a beautiful woman who had been kind to him in her way, and a death consummated in a mindless ocean that was neither kind nor unkind, an ocean that brought nothing and took nothing away. He closed his eyes.
“But try to get back as soon as possible,” Dr. Ratcliffe, his department chairman, was saying. “We understand your problem of course, and we do sympathize. But the university must go on and we do need your services at registration this September.”
Dr. Ratcliffe was perched on the edge of the dinghy, one foot resting on an aluminum slat, the other dangling in the air. He looked distinctly uncomfortable.
“I’ll try to get back as quickly as I can,” said Peter, “but you see my boat sank and just now I’m drifting here in the middle of The Atlantic Ocean.”
“I understand perfectly, Peter. Sometimes these things just can’t be helped. But do try to wrap this up quickly.” Trying to look congenial, Dr. Ratcliffe pinched his face into a painful smile that narrowed his eyes to slits and knotted the skin at his cheekbones.
“It’s very good of you to be so patient,” said Peter. “You see there was a storm—”
“So I understand. The weather has been rather dry back home. Not a cloud in the sky all week long.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, sir.”
“Yes. Well, the flowers do wilt so quickly toward the end of the summer when there’s no rain.” Dr. Ratcliffe stared out across the water and for a moment seemed lost in contemplation.
“That’s a shame, sir,” said Peter.
“Yes. Well, give my best to your wife.”
There was an awkward silence.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Peter. I’d forgotten.”
“That’s all right, sir. Everyone forgets.”
“The truth is I’ve seen too little of you this year. We must get together sometime very soon.”
“That would be very nice.”
“In the meantime I’d be happy to see your face at faculty meetings with a little more regularity.”
“Yes, sir. I’m sorry about that. But you see—”
And then for a few minutes he awoke. He had a vague memory of Dr. Ratcliffe falling off the boat and being carried away by the current. He looked apprehensive, but Peter could see that Dr. Ratcliffe was the kind of man who never lost his dignity, not even when wet.
Now everywhere around him the ocean was mottled with green masses of fernlike plants that lay in long chains that rose and fell with the undulations of the water, and rich brown Sargasso Plants festooned with golden pods and flecks of ivory color. Soon even the clear places were clouded over with plankton and algae and long strands of seaweed. Perhaps, like the sailors in the old salt tales, he would be caught in the swamps of The Sargasso and his bones would lie there in the middle of the ocean until the earth ran dry.
He realized now that his strength was gone. There was an odd shimmer in the air and a roaring in his ears. The drift of green weeds and brown Sargasso Plants became a blur, a smear of color without sharpness or definition. He closed his eyes and leaned against the side of the boat. It would be a bitter thing, he thought, to die as he had lived: to die alone here as he had lived alone in the noisy world of Harrington University. To drift here as he had drifted in his own life, without friends and with that curious inward silence that followed him everywhere.
“I hearby leave my thirteen cases of note cards to Dr. Ratcliffe and to the History Department,” he said out loud. “To do with as he or it sees fit,” he added after a moment. He tried to laugh, but the sound of it was horrible, like the turning of a crank.
An hour later he lifted his head just once more. A heavy mist had settled on the water. It swirled in large circles all about him, obscuring the sun and blinding him. For a moment he imagined that he had reached the edge of the earth and was just at the point of falling off. Then somewhere ahead of him he saw a brown shape, something very large resting in the water. He could not imagine what it was. His eyes would not focus, but he could see that the thing was moving toward him now. Suddenly he was afraid. He tried to cry out, but his throat was closed, swollen with thirst. He tried to sit up, and then quite abruptly everything seemed to dissolve and pass away into a vortex of sounds and colors and then into a cool darkness, a damp cave of sleep where he lay, it seemed, for an endless space of time.
Two
TABOR
“Hello. My name is Tabor.”
The voice came out of the darkness, out of the labyrinth of his delirium. He opened his eyes.
“How do you feel?” said the voice. It belonged to a tall bearded figure in a black seaman’s cap who spoke with a faint European accent, perhaps German or Norwegian. The man was bending over him, and in the background he saw a blur of other shapes bent forward, to peer at him.
“What’s your name?” said the man named Tabor.
“Peter Sutherland,” he answered. “Where am I?”
“You’re in The Sargasso Sea.”
“Sargasso Sea,” he repeated.
“You look a little better,” said Tabor. “You took some soup a half hour ago. Do you remember that?”
“Took some soup,” said Peter. He blinked several times, trying to focus his eyes. “No, I don’t remember. But what ship is this? Where are we going?”
Tabor smiled and shook his head. “This ship no longer has a name,” he said, “and it’s not going anywhere.”
Peter stared into the dark eyes of the man, trying to read the meaning in his words.
“Do you think you can stand up for a moment?” said Tabor. “The only way you’ll really know where you are is to stand up and look around.”
He could see them all now. Two shirtless old men stood behind Tabor. One was very tall and thin and sharp-boned, with a narrow white beard. The other was shorter and rounder. Behind them stood a young girl dressed in a man’s white shirt and black shorts.
“I can stand,” he said. “But why isn’t the ship going anywhere?” He hardly dared ask the question. The possibilities were too strange, too much a part of the dark world from which he had just emerged.
The two old men helped him to his feet.
“Now look around you,” said Tabor.
For a long moment Peter
could not understand or believe what he was seeing. It was as if he had never awakened at all. It was as if somehow this awakening were only an extension of his sleep, a kind of gentle nightmare. How many times would he awake, he wondered, before he awoke into the real world?
He stood on the edge of a sloping cliff, a cliff of many broken ships floating together in the open water, that extended as far as he could see to the east and west. To the south, the ships went for several hundred yards down to a strange shoreline of kelp and seaweed. The boats were of many different types—East India trading ships, frigates, corvettes, bilanders, flutes, an enormous Chinese junk, a seventeenth-century Spanish galleon, clipper ships and New Bedford whalers, and many smaller twentieth-century yachts, schooners, and motor launches of American and British design.
Some of the ships listed at steep angles; others lay on their sides, apparently suspended by thick growths of Sargasso Weeds. Some were nailed together, and some had walkways that connected them with others. Some rested across or on top of other ships that had almost completely submerged in thick growths of strange sea flowers and exotic green plants that Peter had never seen before. In some places there were pools of decaying wood where ships had rotted away. Again, the weeds had apparently not allowed them to sink. In other places, parts of ships had decayed and fallen together with parts of other ships to form a weird progeny of shapes in which it was impossible to tell where one ended and another began. Beyond the shore of the cliff he saw the ghostly outlines of ships sunk just a few inches under the water. And beyond that, a broad extension of water where clouds of fog moved slowly along the surface, clouds that rose high enough to obscure the sun and turn the air gray.
Aside from the four people who stood around him there seemed to be no one else in any of the boats. Everywhere there was silence except for the creaking of wood and the lapping and gurgling of the green water. It was like an enormous elephant’s graveyard set in the middle of a barren ocean.
“The Sargasso Sea is two thousand miles long and a thousand miles wide,” said Tabor. “Most of it is just open sea. But here near the center of it is our little island of derelicts. The current moves in a circle, you see, and carries everything that has no power of its own to the center.”
“But—how do you get back to land?” said Peter.
“There’s no way back,” said Tabor.
“But surely there will be rescue parties?”
“No one knows we’re here,” said Tabor.
He stared at Tabor and then at the island of boats, trying to digest what he had heard. “You can’t mean that we’re trapped here for the rest of our lives,” he said finally.
Tabor began to answer him and then apparently thought better of it. “I don’t think we can answer all your questions just now,” he said. “You need to rest for a while. After you’ve had some sleep and something to eat we can talk again.”
Tabor nodded to the two old men, who with a strength that belied their age, lifted Peter in their arms and carried him across several old wrecks and then down eight steps into the cabin of a large American schooner. The room was clean and it smelled of varnish. In the foreward section stood an instrument panel, the wheel, and a series of cabinets for instruments and supplies. Through a large steering port above the wheel he saw the boat adjacent to his, and beyond that, a curve of blue water. On the opposite side of the room stood an antique fourposter bed and a circular wooden table with two hurricane lamps and a brass bowl filled with water. The sight of these things was somehow enormously reassuring, and for the first time since the storm something inside him let go, like a cold fist around his heart opening suddenly, releasing him.
The two old men set him down on the bed, nodded rather formally, and left. There were a hundred questions in his mind, but when he tried to form them into words they dissolved into pieces and he could not even speak; it was then he realized that he was too tired to get up, to follow them, to find out in a clearer way just where in the world he was. In an agony of fatigue and pain he undressed and then lay back on the bed. The clean sheets and the firm mattress were an almost unbearable luxury to his exhausted and bruised body. The sound of the water and the creaking boards faded away. He slept very deeply and without dreams until the next morning. When he awoke, a young girl was standing near the foot of the bed, looking at him with great curiosity. Long black hair fell past her shoulders. Her eyes were lustrous and dark, like black pearls.
“Good morning, Sutherland,” she said. She held a wooden tray with two steaming wooden bowls and an earthenware pitcher and cup. For a moment he couldn’t remember where he was.
“I see the sharks have eaten your tongue,” she said. “Perhaps it will grow back after you’ve had breakfast.”
She set the tray on the edge of his bed. In one bowl steam was rising from a kind of porridge made from something that looked suspiciously like seaweed, and a yellowish meal that he did not recognize. In the other bowl there were pieces of boiled fish.
“It looks delicious,” he lied. “Thank you very much.”
But when he began to eat he discovered that it really was delicious. And the taste of food awakened his hunger, a hunger that for days had been dulled by monotony and then by sickness.
“You mustn’t eat too quickly,” she said. “You’ll get sick.”
He looked up at her. She wore a man’s shirt and black shorts. Suddenly he recognized her as the girl he had seen on deck the previous day. Then everything came back to him: Tabor, the two old men, the strange island of derelict ships.
“I see you are beginning to remember,” she said.
“Yes. The ships. All the hundreds of broken ships.”
“It must have given you a strange feeling. I mean, seeing it for the first time.”
“I still don’t quite understand. Just where are we?”
“On The Drift. All the boats together are called The Drift.”
“And where is The Drift? At the center of The Sargasso Sea?”
“We’re at the center of the current, which is a little east of the center of the sea. No one knows exactly where in latitude and longitude.”
“How many people live here?”
“Over a hundred. We live all over The Drift in different clans. Ours is the smallest. It’s called The Mary Strattford. The Madrids are up toward Northside on the west side of The Cliff. The Bluewaters go from the southwest side up to The Bridge.”
Peter stared at her and tried very hard to listen, but the words would not register, would not make sense. “How long has The Drift been here?” he said.
“No one knows. Tabor says the first people here were called Carthaginians. He says there’s a piece of one of their ships in our museum at The Bridge. I can take you there someday if you like.”
The girl was smiling as if she enjoyed his questions. She could not have been more than nineteen or twenty.
“Tabor said no one ever gets off The Drift. Is that true?”
“Sometimes new people come, as you did, but yes, it’s true that no one ever leaves. But there is one story about how once thirty years ago a man got permission from The Hatchmaker to go back home.”
“Who’s The Hatchmaker?”
“He’s something that lives at Driftsend—that’s the stern of The Drift. He gave this man a white boat with an immortal golden sail and the next morning he went back to Philadelphia.”
“Philadelphia?”
“It’s only two day’s ride by boat. It’s out there just beyond where the sun comes from, on an island called Pennsylvania.”
“An island called Pennsylvania?”
“The name means ‘Penn’s Woods.’ Tabor told me that.”
“Did Tabor also tell you that Pennsylvania was an island?”
“Oh no,” she said. “Everyone knows that.”
“I see. Well, tell me about the man who got away in the boat with the golden sail.”
“There isn’t really anything else to tell,” she said. “No one knows how he persu
aded The Hatchmaker to let him go, and and no one knows what happened to him when he got to Pennsylvania.”
Peter finished his breakfast, got out of bed, stretched his arms, and walked out onto the deck of his boat. It was a strange, impossible world, unchanged since yesterday. The long slender deck of his ruined schooner ran to a sword’s point at the bow, and beyond it, ships lay everywhere locked against each other in bizarre, tilted patterns. To the south patches of mist blurred the horizon.
Surely, he thought, it was all a weird game of some sort. Or a hallucination. He was sure that such a thing as The Drift was not scientifically possible. But at any rate, he had been saved from death at sea. The question was, what had he been saved for? How would he live here? How would he escape back to his own life? He stood with the young girl near the rail of his schooner and looked out at the vague mist.
His own life. He tried to think back to what that might have been. A few weeks before, he had been a history instructor at Harrington University in Connecticut. Generally it had been a dismal life filled with students, committee meetings, and his wife’s country club friends who found, even after the divorce, that it was fashionable to have a college professor in their circle who could play a decent game of tennis. He had hoped that a week of fishing in The Caribbean would give him time to think, time to sort things out. He smiled. Certainly now he would have that time. Weeks or months or perhaps even the rest of his life if one took the girl and Tabor at their word.
His life in Connecticut seemed now like a comfortable misery, a familiar desperation that he had learned to live with, when he compared it to the prospect of lifelong solitude on an island of wrecked ships. At least in his old world there was hope that he would eventually discover some continuity in his life, something beyond the small pyrrhic victories and redundancies of the teaching profession and the casual amusements he shared with Miriam’s friends, things that stood out like small glacial boulders in a vast desert. It was true that his life had always been a series of isolated events, but at least the hope, possibly only the dream of things changing, was something to hang on to.
