A Mile Down

by David Vann

  During these cruises, a curious thing happened: without quite meaning to, I sold loans for the new boat. I was simply telling my story to people who asked, but the story became a kind of spiel as I learned that these people—sometimes without my even asking—were willing to loan me money.

  The questions came because the business was unique. But what interested these people, really, were dreams. I couldn’t get a job as a professor, and I couldn’t make any money as a writer, but instead of taking a job I didn’t want, I was creating my own university on the water. It was an American Dream founded on another more recent dream, of Continuing Education, and my guests could feel satisfaction from participation in both. The two dreams fit together so well because really, in their best parts, they’re the same dream. How many of us ever get the chance to live a life in which everything comes together perfectly, so that everything we do engages us and represents who we are?

  By the end of the summer, I purchased the hull with loans from my guests. Seref and I tried to make a more detailed budget for finishing, but really there were too many unknowns. I would ship much of the equipment from the United States. The labor and wood and other basic materials were all cheaper in Turkey. Seref was going to put together a team of Bodrum’s finest: the best electrician, carpenter, mechanic, and painter. He had the contacts, and this was a good, interesting boat, so he could get the best people, he said, and still keep the cost low. We would leave the boat in the yard’s shed for three or four months, to lay the deck, paint the hull, finish the pilothouse, and install its windows, then the boat would be dragged outside and finished on the beach.

  These were exciting times, making plans and walking through the enormous steel hull. I felt extremely lucky.

  That fall and winter I kept raising loans and sending large amounts of money to Seref. Construction was fully underway. It was bothering me, though, that I couldn’t be there, on site, to supervise. I was still teaching at Stanford fall and spring, and running charters on Grendel in Mexico during the winter.

  Already it was seeming the boat would go over budget. Seref became cagey in February and March, no longer committing to stay within a certain range.

  Then came the war in Kosovo. It filled the news all spring. As a result, Americans were not traveling to Turkey and no one was signing up for my charters. In addition to creative writing classes, I was offering great courses in classics and archaeology by professors from Stanford. The potential students—successful, intelligent professionals from the San Francisco Bay Area and across the United States—told me again and again over the phone that the trips sounded wonderful and they would have signed up if not for the war.

  I tried to point out that the war was not in Turkey, but in 1999, American geography lumped Turkey with all the other nameless countries around it, so no one cared. One woman, after receiving a postcard I had sent to five thousand people on the Poets & Writers mailing list, sent several notes cursing me for offering cruises in a place where warplanes were flying over every day and children were dying. I didn’t know what to write back to her. That the warplanes she was thinking of were flying over Italy but not Turkey? That children are always dying in every country, but not currently in Turkey except from causes other than the war in Kosovo? Turkey has a million-man standing army. The idea that the ground war in Kosovo could have somehow spilled into Turkey was a bit imaginative.

  The big political event for Turkey was the nabbing of the Kurdish rebel leader Ocalan (pronounced Oh-je-lawn) by the government. This triggered a U.S. State Department warning to travelers and also kept Americans away from Turkey, though it shouldn’t have. Whether one considered Ocalan the true and persecuted leader of the Kurds in Turkey or simply a butcher and drug lord most Kurds didn’t want any part of, either way his capture would lead to the most politically peaceful summer in Turkey in fifteen years.

  Instead of making $200,000 in net income that summer, to help pay for the construction of the boat, I would take a loss. But every two weeks I still had to come up with another $25,000 or so for construction, and I didn’t have any money. The boat was being financed through credit cards and loans from former passengers, and my reliance on credit cards was increasing. I was working hard at selling loans, but with Ocalan and Kosovo, they were getting harder to sell.

  By the time I left again for Turkey, in early June 1999, after frantically reading and grading to finish teaching my four spring courses at Stanford, I was far behind financially. It was possible that construction would stop and the boat would not be launched. I was forced to cancel several empty charters to consolidate the summer and reduce my losses. Now my first charter wasn’t until the end of July. But I wasn’t sure the boat could be ready by then even if I came up with the money to keep construction going. I wasn’t sleeping, and I was doubting myself, wondering why on earth I had ever decided to build this bigger boat. The weight of debt and failure seemed a physical thing lodged in my chest and far beyond my control.

  The things I believed about myself were becoming untrue. I believed I always succeeded. I believed my hard work would pay off. I believed I was good for my word, that of course I would repay any debt. I believed I treated people well and fairly. I wanted to keep believing these things. And I knew my father had felt this same fear, of becoming something other than what he had always imagined himself to be. I wondered if this was part of what had made suicide begin to seem reasonable.

  WHEN I ARRIVED in Turkey that June, the boat was down on the beach, among the great wooden hulls. Its masts lay alongside, one ninety feet long, the other sixty. I had chosen wood because it evokes the romance of sailing and the sea.

  “I selected this wood myself,” Seref said, a hand on the main mast. “I let it dry for over two months. So strong.”

  I walked along the mast, happy to be with Seref again and happy to be in this beautiful place, on ancient shores. But the two men who were screwing aluminum sail track to its aft edge were not caulking. They were just putting the screws in dry, which would rot the wood. One of the two men had a bandage over his thumb, except that it ended short of where a thumb should be.

  “What happened to his thumb?” I asked Seref.

  “He lost it a few days ago working on some wood for the boat.”

  I looked again at the man and his bandage. This was terrible. I couldn’t believe he had lost his thumb building my boat.

  “He is clumsy,” Seref said. “He already loses another finger building another boat. You don’t need to worry about it. And he doesn’t understand English, don’t worry.”

  “But I have to do something.” Though I couldn’t think of what to do. It seemed so crass to give money. How does money replace a thumb? What I wanted was to make it not have happened.

  “I already give him something,” Seref said. “It is done. Don’t think about it. Come.” He gestured toward the other end of the mast. “We have to decide something.”

  I looked at the man again and nodded to him. “I’m sorry,” I said. I felt like a monster. He had a face that didn’t show anything to me, no remorse or pain or resentment or even recognition. If anything, he seemed impatient for me to leave so he could get back to work. I had no idea what to think or feel or do, so I turned and followed Seref.

  The top of the main mast had a stainless steel cap with a lot of wires and attachments.

  “We have to decide this,” Seref said. “You said you want battery cable to here, and a post for the lightning?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “And a bonding plate below on one of the keels, and the grounds run to the hull. That way the lightning has a quick path to the water.”

  “Okay,” he said. “You like your masts?”

  “Well, they’re not caulking the screws. And they’re using two pieces of track, not one continuous piece, so every time I pull the sail down, it will get caught where the track is being joined. And the lower spreaders are supposed to have twin notches for the wires, not just one notch, and the ends of all the sprea
ders need boots. And the masts themselves are very heavy.”

  Seref smiled at me, then grabbed both of my shoulders. “David. I will say this to you. This boat is not finished. When it is finished, I will hand you the keys and everything will be done. Everything. Okay?” He let go of one of my shoulders and held an imaginary set of keys in the air.

  I didn’t believe him, but what could I say? I knew now I should have been working with a shipyard to finish the boat, not with the owner of a tour company, because at least some and perhaps all of the mistakes Seref was making were from lack of experience, not by design. But the summer before, when I had first bought the hull, I had believed, and Seref had encouraged me to believe, that he possessed the necessary experience and expertise and could finish the boat for less without the shipyard. Now he was doing his best, but his best might not be good enough, and it was too late for me to go with anyone else. I had given all of my money to Seref.

  Seref led me up the ladder to see more. The deck was newly sanded, the space enormous, magnificent for sailing through the Mediterranean and Caribbean. The pilothouse was nearly finished. The dash under the forward windows, in mahogany strips caulked like decking, was varnished a deep, gleaming auburn.

  “This looks great,” I said, and Seref smiled and beckoned me below, down the companionway.

  Below was a different story. I felt sick seeing it. The main salon and galley were bare steel. No deck, no walls, no ceiling, no galley partition or settee or desk. He hadn’t done anything in here.

  But Seref had already gone down the next set of stairs to the aft cabins, so I followed. Here, too, the floor was only steel, the ceilings bare with wires hanging. The walls for the hallway were tongue-and-groove mahogany, and the frames for the doors to the six aft staterooms had been fitted, but the wall going aft on the starboard side had a large bend to it. I was overwhelmed by disappointment and fear and could latch onto only this one detail. “This wall,” I told Seref. “It isn’t straight.”

  “It will be straightened,” Seref said.

  “When? I run a charter in six weeks. The wall has already been set. They’re building the room onto it now.”

  “David. I said I would fix it. Now look at one of your staterooms.”

  I looked at one, and it was not what he had promised. It was solid mahogany, tongue-and-groove, as requested. But the strips of mahogany were greatly uneven. As I looked along any wall, I could see a strip of mahogany sticking out here and there. And it was all too late. The boat would have these imperfections until its final day. It had already gone far over budget, it still required more equipment and construction, and it was being built full of flaws.

  I saw, too, that the insulation they were using behind the walls was only Styrofoam. They had just broken pieces of Styrofoam and stuck them in against the steel, then nailed the plywood over it. The corrosion would be a nightmare. In April, when I had visited for three days, I had asked for spray foam over all the steel before any wood was placed. That way the hull would last, would not rust from the inside.

  “What about the spray foam?” I asked. “Where is the spray foam?”

  “Yes, we need to talk about this. Now tell me what it is exactly that you want.”

  “But we’ve already talked about it, many times. And now it’s too late. You can’t spray anymore. You’ve already built over the steel.” I turned away from Seref into one of the other rooms. I was not proud of myself, of how I was complaining, but nothing was right, and it was all too late, and what does one do?

  I looked in one of the heads and saw that they were not finished either. Toilets still not installed, no sinks, no tile on the floor, walls unpainted. Eight of these bathrooms, one for each stateroom, and nothing had been done yet with any of them.

  “We must talk about the bathrooms,” Seref said. “What type of sinks you want. We will have to buy these. I have an idea, a good type of sink.”

  “Where are the toilets?” I asked. “The nine toilets that I bought and sent clear back in December, half a year ago, $750 each, so they could be installed right away?”

  “David, really you push too much. They are in the back rooms, the same as when you visited in April. We are waiting to decide on the floors first.” He was looking out into the hallway. Many of the men were listening to us with one ear while they worked, some of them able to understand English, and I knew this bothered him.

  “Well decide it now. Tile. Just put in some tile. White or green or whatever you can find. I have to run a charter in six weeks. You have to start deciding and working faster. You will not finish at this pace.”

  Seref put one hand through his hair and exhaled, then he walked out of the room. I was pissing him off, which was fine with me. It seemed necessary at this point.

  I walked back through the bare main salon and down a hatch in the galley to the engine room. I found Ecrem in there with a shop light. I had met Ecrem in April, a small guy who looked almost English but spoke no English. He worked for very little money, Seref said, and he was doing most of the mechanical and plumbing work. We both smiled and nodded and said hello in Turkish. That was all we could do, so he went back to work, welding a platform for a discharge pump, sending white-blue light in jagged shapes along the steel walls. I could see myself outlined in these flashes like a burglar as I walked back between the engines.

  I pulled out my flashlight. Beautiful new diesels painted a dull blue. I traced their fuel lines and exhaust systems and found problems.

  Seref called for me and I yelled I was in the engine room. I was going to tell him about the engines, but he came down the ladder with the electrician, a formal old man I had met in April who was reputed to be the best in Bodrum for a boat’s electrical systems. He and Seref showed me the fuse box for the twenty-four-volt system, and I asked how the engine batteries tied in. They looked puzzled and we went up to the electrical panels, which had been custom made in the United States and shipped to Turkey. Behind the panels were the big switches, and it was the cables to these I started tracing. They weren’t run the way I had asked.

  “These switches here,” I showed both men, “in the emergency position, need to connect to the house banks.”

  The old man waved his finger back and forth, telling me no. He clucked with his tongue, as if I were an ignorant child. Then he talked to Seref in Turkish.

  “He says they cannot connect to the house banks,” Seref said. “He says the engines are only twelve volts and the house banks are twenty-four.”

  “What?” I asked.

  Seref talked with the man again, then repeated the news to me.

  “Seref, you told me the engines were twenty-four-volt. I had the panels built, the switches ordered, and the entire system designed around twenty-four-volt engines.”

  Seref looked bewildered. “No,” he said. “Just a moment.”

  He talked again with the man, who started gesturing. I didn’t feel like waiting.

  “What was he doing in putting together the whole wiring plan, Seref? None of it made any sense if the engines were twelve volt. What are these switches doing now?”

  Seref put his hand up. “Calm down, David. Really. You mustn’t talk like that. Really.”

  I tried not to get upset. I tried just to listen and explain. But none of this boded well at all.

  “I don’t know how he make this mistake,” Seref said finally when the old man had gone. He had his hand rubbing the top of his head. I decided to back off, but then I remembered the engines.

  “We should talk about the engines, too, Seref.”

  “Ecrem is working on the engines. He will arrange all.”

  “There are no siphon breaks. The engines could be flooded with saltwater. They were supposed to be added by the yard before the boat was moved out here.”

  “They are coming, in the next week or two, they will do this. They know about this. They have not forgotten. Or I will have Ecrem do it. I take care of this. You don’t worry. Come. We go.” He walked up on deck a
nd I followed. Before going down the ladder to the ground, though, I wanted to see the crew quarters. “Nothing has happened in the crew quarters,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  On the drive back to Bodrum, Seref did not want to speak to me. I looked out at the water passing, at the large boats, the new hotels, the bougainvillea and whitewashed patios, the castle on the point. This beautiful place.

  “I have a charter in six weeks,” I said. “If everything is not done, and done right, I will fail, and then I will not bring more guests or build more boats. There will be no more business from me.” Seref made a considerable amount from my guests, since he arranged hotels, cars, flights, and tours for them before and after my charters. He was receiving commissions from everything I spent, too. That’s the system in Turkey. He never did admit to me that he was taking commissions every time we bought anything for the boat, but I was fairly certain he was.

  “It is your first night in Bodrum,” Seref said. “Have dinner with my family tonight. We will pick you up from your hotel at eight o’clock.”

  We didn’t say anything more the rest of the drive. He dropped me off at a hotel that was not fancy, since I had asked for something cheap. I wanted to sleep on the boat but that would not be possible for some time, probably not until after launch.

  The room was small, with bare dirty carpet, a small bathroom, and no air-conditioning. It was hot but I didn’t care. I opened the window to a view of small houses on a hill, bright in the sunlight with white walls, red tile, and purple flowers. I could hear the latest Cher song blasting from some corner club, “Do you believe in life after love, after love, after love, after love…?” Nancy and I loved Turkey for its obnoxious waterfront clubs. I flopped down on the bed exhausted and set my alarm to sleep for two hours. In a few minutes, as I was drifting off, I heard the loudspeakers from the minarets start up from three mosques. The Arabic chanting over the pop music, the tones leading up toward Allah, the praise and subjugation in it and the sound, too, of bitterness and defeat, of human disappointment. Maybe I was making up that last part. I was still tired from the flights.