Crossings

by Alex Landragin

  Shortly before dawn, the quartermaster woke the midshipmen and the mates while the bosun stood at the main hatchway and barked instructions. ‘All hands! Larboard watch ahoy!’ Shortly after, I smelled charcoal smoke as the cook lit a fire in the galley. For a moment I was at a loss as to what to do, but like an automaton my body stirred into action, storing my hammock, taking a holystone from the hold, climbing the hatchway and setting to polishing the deck and flemishing the lines. Everything felt habitual and unhabitual at once. At eight o’clock, the bosun’s mate piped breakfast. Most of the crew had slept poorly and were hungover, and we ate our miserable stew of rotten oatmeal in silence.

  I looked out for you – for the new you, in the body of the strangers’ sage. But I now remembered, without any effort on my part, that the strangers were not strangers but French, and that the medicine man was a surgeon, and his name was Roblet. And so the memories of my new body came to me in this way, naturally and of their own accord, like bubbles to the water’s surface.

  At eleven, Icard called all hands on deck and the captain addressed the crew. Finally I saw you, standing among the masters on the quarterdeck. Your eyes darted here and there, as if, unsure of your surrounds, you wished to draw as little attention to yourself as possible, while observing proceedings closely for clues as to how to behave. Captain Marchand issued orders that three men were to be flogged as a result of the events of the previous day: twelve lashes for the helmsman Bonicard for drunkenness; twelve for Roussetty – the man who had shot you – for the reckless discharge of his firearm; while I was to receive twenty-four lashes for my disobedience and desertion of my station. As he spoke, Icard and two sailors rigged a grating for the flogging. I was to be last.

  First Bonicard had the flesh on his back flayed by the cat-o’-nine-tails. Then it was Roussetty’s turn. The crew watched on silently with a combination of horror, sympathy, amusement and boredom – the sight was clearly no novelty to them. Then I was called forth. I removed my shirt and the bosun’s mate, Infernet, strapped my wrists to the grating and walked back several paces with the whip in his hand. The first lash landed upon my back, and could hardly have inflicted more pain than had I been slashed with a knife. It was followed by another, and another, each more terrible than the last. Icard counted aloud as each blow flailed my skin. I fainted for the first time at the eleventh stroke, and several times thereafter. Each time I fainted I was revived with a bucket of sea water that served only to excite my afflictions. Afterward I had to be carried down the hatch, while a man followed me with a mop and bucket to wipe away all trace of blood.

  I was hauled to the sick bay and laid upon my stomach on the surgeon’s table, whereupon I fainted once again. At the next seizure of pain I opened my eyes – and there you were, mere inches away from me, tending to my wounds with a cloth in one hand and a bottle of spirits in the other. You moved slowly, tentatively, as if every movement you were making was for the first time. I recognised the same hesitation in myself. Reynier, the surgeon’s mate, stood by your side, looking at you quizzically, sensing all was not right with you. He could not know what I knew: that, not knowing what to do, you were waiting for the impulse to come to you from somewhere unknown, that in your hesitation you were searching for some intuition of what to do next. You were listening to your new body, waiting for the memories of what to do to come to you, one at a time: take the rag, dab it with spirits, press it gently upon the wound, and though it hurts the man, undoubtedly, it cleanses him too.

  I continued to sink in and out of sleep, each time awakened by the throes of suffering my wounds inflicted upon me. You bent over me, alleviating my pains by adding to them, aided by Reynier, who sensed your uncertainty and gently suggested the techniques as were normally used in such situations. In my pain, I was consoled by your nearness. When you brought a cup of water mixed with spirits to my lips and told me to drink, I took comfort in your touch.

  ‘Koahu,’ I whispered in the old language through my veil of agony. You seemed not to have heard me. ‘Koahu,’ I repeated in our language, ‘it’s me, Alula.’ I thought I saw you freeze for just an instant, and glance at me, before you resumed your activity. ‘Koahu, I saw what happened with the medicine man,’ I said. ‘I followed you. I crossed too.’ The words came out with great effort, as the new mouth was unaccustomed to making such sounds.

  You put your hand on my forehead. ‘Speaking in tongues,’ you said in the new language, ‘hallucinations, but thankfully no fever.’

  ‘Koahu,’ I repeated, ‘can you not hear me? It is I, Alula, I have followed you, can you not understand?’

  ‘Reynier,’ you said, again speaking the new language, ‘go tell the bosun Joubert is to be relieved of duty for two days. He needs rest. Work would only finish him off.’ Once more you put the cup to my lips to drink. ‘Do not fear, your suffering is a commonplace thing. Flogging is cruel and stupid and utterly futile, serving only to break men and to set them against their masters.’ You cradled my hands in your own and I began to weep. To relieve my torment, you gave me laudanum to drink. Unable to sleep on my back in a hammock, I fell into a fitful slumber right there on the surgical table, lying on my stomach. You settled into a chair beside me, to spend the night keeping vigil over your patient. I was woken in the middle of the night by your screams.

  My wounds healed quickly enough. Before long I was back at my post, standing on lookout high among the sails, where I could meditate at my leisure upon recent events. The Solide continued to be carried by the trade winds into the fogs of the north Pacific. But from a distance, every night, I heard you calling out in your tormented sleep. The nightly hullabaloo you raised soon began to stoke the flames of superstition in the crew. Sailors sleep poorly even in the most placid sea, and are in the habit of stewing on their grievances like a cook stirring his soup. These nocturnal disturbances became a favourite topic of conversation among the more conspiratorially minded, who gathered together below decks, whispering at first and later declaring their speculations boldly to all who would listen: the doctor had been possessed, they said, that night on the island, by the spirit of the dead boy.

  I avoided the idle gossip and wild speculations, though they were truer than any reasonable man might have imagined. I had speculations of my own to confirm. I could not understand what had happened. To begin with, I’d been certain that you had made a crossing. But in denying me you had planted in me the seed of a doubt, a seed that found fertile ground. Was I all alone on this boat? Had I left the island for no good purpose? Had I desecrated the Law in error? My intent had been to follow and protect you, to help you return to the island, to uphold the Law and our love, but now it appeared that in trying to honour the Law I had only succeeded in desecrating it. This thought tormented me.

  I sighted, from my lookout one morning, an island in the west, my heart thudding with joy at the thought that we might have miraculously returned to the island so recently left behind – but the island was one of those known as the Sandwich Islands. We did not stop or even deviate from our northerly course, for this archipelago was already well explored and the captain was anxious to arrive at our destination before the northern autumn, when conditions for sailing become anything but pacific.

  The day after this sighting, I saw an albatross that had set its course to that of the ship, eyeing, no doubt, the school of pilot fish following in our wake. The crew, much perturbed by the nightly screams emanating from the doctor’s quarters, were delighted at the omen. The albatross continued to follow us for three days, gliding overhead hour after hour, waiting for the cook to throw his kitchen scraps overboard and for the pilot fish to rise to the surface to feast on them. Then it would dive to the water to eat its fill. At night, it would perch atop the foremast and rest there. On the third day it flew off, taking with it the little glimmer of happiness it had brought us.

  The Solide continued to sail north across the ocean. I tried to mind my own affairs, attending to my chores and keeping lookout at my post.
I became accustomed to my new body. It was, for the most part, an easy body to inhabit. Though Joubert was but twenty years old, he had been at sea more than half his life. Before that, he had lived the life of a street urchin in Toulon. I loved the freedom and the rigours of the sailor’s life. The freedoms of port life, on the other hand, I could not abide: I had inherited a taste for rum, a cunning mind and a vindictive temper to match. I bore bitter grudges that I could never let die. I was the most loyal of friends, but in the role of foe, the merest unresolved slight might become, in the shadows of my heart, a lifelong vendetta bearing little resemblance to the modesty of its origin.

  I never stopped seeking out a way to speak with you directly – in vain. This was no straightforward thing, for I was but an ordinary seaman and you a master. Other than in illness and injury, a ship’s surgeon has scant opportunity to commune with the crew. Oft-times I doubted such an opportunity would ever come. My old friend Brice noted the sullenness into which I had fallen, barely guessing its true cause, and began to badger me about it. Although I had little tolerance for such banter, and told him so, still he continued, often alluding to it at the mess table. One night, as we chewed without appetite on our biscuit dipped in foul brackish water, Brice addressed me with tender-hearted exasperation. ‘What’s taken hold of you, Joubert? Ever since you cavorted with that savage you’ve been acting strangely. Are you in love? Are you afflicted with some malady of the loins?’ I felt a rising tide of rage so strong I launched myself at him with a view to landing a blow that would shatter his jaw and quit his badgering. Thankfully I missed, for I would have been flogged once more and might not have survived another ordeal. But my only friend was lost to me, and for the rest of the voyage I never passed over an occasion to slight him.

  In the heavy fogs of autumn, we sighted land once more, and a cheer went up among the weary crew. We had come to our destination, the islands of the Alexander Archipelago. The aim of our expedition was to purchase furs from the natives, which we would take to Macau to sell to the Chinese. At each landing, we made it known that we wished to trade their skins of beaver, seal, otter, bear, elk and wolf in exchange for guns, iron nails, knives, blankets and spirits. But on each occasion we learned that all their best furs had been sold to another ship only weeks before, leaving us a meagre assortment of second-rate merchandise. Our luck was no better in the Queen Charlotte Islands. And so, with winter approaching and our commerce left greatly in want, we set sail for China, hoping there to sell what furs we had procured. By the time we departed Alaska, a wintry pall was set in across the sky and the ocean had become stroppy and cruel.

  I barely said a word to you over the next few weeks, but I thought of you constantly. A crossing is a perilous venture. Each one is slightly different. Some crossings fare better than others, and no two crossings are the same. You had been young, not yet fully initiated. Then there was the musket shot. Perhaps it had interrupted the crossing somehow, cutting it short. And now, though you seemed to remember nothing of your previous life, every night you were racked with nightmares. What was left of you? I longed to speak to you at greater length, but for now I could only bide my time and watch you from afar. With the passage of time you shed your hesitations and became more assured in your work. The memories buried within you of your craft were retrieved by the demands placed upon you, the knowledge returning not all at once but in a drip, one remembrance at a time. Perhaps, I reasoned, your memories of your other, previous life would return to you in a similar way.

  There is many an idle hour when a ship is at open sea. A man’s mind, in such slackness, can twist upon itself like old rope. So a sailor devises all kinds of ways to amuse himself, with cards and dice, with song and dance, with the telling of stories and jokes, with the whittling of driftwood and the knotting of lines, and the inventing of designs with which to adorn his body. Since our passage through the South Seas, tattoos had become something of an obsession among masters and seamen alike. Before the crossing Joubert had been esteemed as the finest aboard for his drawings on paper and skin. It was no strange thing for a seaman to approach me asking that I draw a sea monster upon his back, or the name of his sweetheart upon his shoulder. But on occasion a man would come with no specific drawing in mind, simply the desire to feel the satisfying prick of the needle piercing his skin. Whenever I was left at liberty to draw whatever I fancied, I liked to tattoo upon their skin the figure of an eye, such as the eyes that were tattooed on the skins of my island people. After I’d drawn several of them, these tattoos became admired among the crew as a memento of our circumnavigation, only the second such expedition by a French vessel. Even some of the masters came to me, requesting that I ink the design into their skin. Such is the superstitious tendency of a sailor’s soul, they believed that this tattoo was an omen of good fortune.

  On a calm Sunday afternoon, as we neared the coast of Formosa after an especially wrathful storm had besieged the ship for two days, I was in the hold, inking the image of a whale on Mozoly’s back by the light of a porthole, when you approached us. You paused to observe my technique, as if I were undertaking a medical procedure. You asked questions of me. You watched me dab the needle in the ink and sink it deep into Mozoly’s skin. You explained how the needle penetrated the skin’s outer layers and went so deep as to set the ink permanently upon the body. Mozoly hid his discomfort, with the pride of a veteran sailor. Once the picture was done, he walked away sore but with a smile, to display his new adornment to his shipmates. You asked if I might draw one of my tattoos on the back of your shoulder. An eye? No, you said, the Virgin Mary. You admitted having prayed to her during the storm, promising her that if the ship were spared you would have her image engraved on your person.

  When Mozoly was gone, you removed your shirt and sat on a chair before me at an angle so that your shoulder was directly before me. I dipped the needle into the India ink and began puncturing your skin with holes of blue. When a man is having his skin tattooed, it takes him some time to become accustomed to the sting of the needle. Once habituated, he learns to ignore the sensation, even to enjoy it. ‘Tell me, doctor,’ I said when I sensed that you were used to the pain, ‘for some time you have been greatly tormented in your sleep. I have heard your afflictions – we all have. What are these nightmares that torture you so?’

  ‘I admit,’ you replied, ‘it is irksome for me to know that I make such a din. The dreams themselves are strange and confused. Oftentimes I cannot remember anything of them, and if I do it is but a glimpse. They seem to take place on that island where the boy was shot.’

  ‘Koahu,’ I said. ‘The boy’s name was Koahu.’

  ‘Koahu,’ you repeated. ‘I cannot get this Koahu out of my head.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said as I dipped the needle once more into the ink and then plunged it into the skin of your shoulder, trying to be as gentle as possible, ‘perhaps there is a reason for this.’

  ‘The reason is surely nothing more than guilt. But it was an accident. How can I be guilty if it was an accident?’

  ‘Perhaps it is more than guilt.’ I continued my work as I spoke: needle in ink, perforation of skin, stain of midnight blue. ‘Perhaps if you think back to that moment you will remember something that might help you understand what happened. Perhaps it is not guilt that bothers you but something else – something unusual, something perhaps miraculous in its nature.’

  You were looking ahead now, into the darkness of the hold. ‘I am a surgeon. I have seen many a corpse. Many a man has died in my care, some even in my arms. And yet the memory of that boy haunts me still.’

  ‘Perhaps it is more than a memory that haunts you, doctor. Have you not considered the possibility . . .’ I began, and paused, waiting for the words to come.

  ‘What possibility?’

  ‘The possibility that the boy – the boy . . .’ I knew not how to continue, so I pushed a needle into you, only in my nervous state I plunged it too deep. You flinched. I removed the needle, but blood had begun
to seep from the puncture.

  ‘I thought you knew what you were doing!’ you snapped.

  ‘Forgive me,’ I said, wiping your skin clear of the scarlet drop.

  ‘I ought to leech the wound.’

  ‘Wait, I beseech you, I’m almost done. It won’t happen again.’

  ‘If you talked less perhaps you would work better. And such idle talk! Such futile conjecture!’

  In silence, I resumed dipping the needle in the ink and puncturing your skin. The auspiciousness of the moment had passed, and yet I was so close to my goal that I could not stop now. ‘What I am trying to suggest,’ I continued, as calmly as I could, ‘is that perhaps the cause of your nightly torment is that . . . you are not who you think you are. Or rather, you are more than you realise. Perhaps, on the island, you divined something about the customs of the natives. Perhaps your curiosity led to an exchange of some sort, completely unexpected, an exchange of souls – do you see what I am trying to say? Perhaps Koahu is in you. Perhaps he is you.’ The drawing was finished. I poured sea water upon it to cleanse it and cool the reddened skin. I had not drawn the Virgin Mary, as you had asked. I’d drawn an eye, the finest eye I had ever drawn. I knew you would be enraged, that there would be consequences, but I wanted that eye to be there whenever you espied a reflection of yourself. For as long as you were alive in that body, that eye would be there, returning your gaze in the mirror’s reflection, reminding you of our conversation. I gave you a looking-glass to hold, and held up a second one so that you could see the reflection of it.