Tim Curran: Dead Sea

He was imagining a tall building at night, all the windows lit.. . then, one by one, the lights going out. Lights Out. That was also the name of an old spooky radio show. And what did the announcer say at the beginning while that distant bell was gonging? It… is.. . later… than… you… think…

Iverson kept scanning channels. “Something funny here,” he said.

And, yeah, it was funny, all right. Gosling was thinking it was funny, too. Because something was building here, something was happening incrementally and he didn’t honestly know what it was. Only that he could feel it gathering momentum. Like some negative electrical charge in the air gaining impetus.

There was a shrill beeping.

Iverson said, “GPS says we’re off-line… interference or something…”

There was a hint of panic to his voice and Gosling knew it wasn’t just his imagination now: Iverson was feeling it, too. Maybe one system would go to hell, but all of them? One after the other?

Together, they walked over to the binnacle. The magnetic compass was spinning around in circles. The gyrocompass was rolling, trying to find a bearing.

“Jesus,” Iverson said.

“You see?” Fabrini said when Menhaus and he were in their cabin with Cook snoring away. “I knew there was a catch to this shit. I just fucking knew it. Didn’t I tell you that night that there had to be a catch?”

Menhaus nodded. With sleepy eyes, he studied the clouds of smoke he was exhaling. “You did indeed. You surely did.”

“And I was right, goddammit. Fifteen-thousand for what? Three weeks’ work? Yeah, that’s what he said. He left out the crap about poisonous snakes and leeches and man-eating alligators.”

“Crocodiles. Caimans. Cushing said-”

“Who gives a damn what you call ‘em. They eat your ass all the same.”

Menhaus chewed his lower lip, stroked his mustache. “Saks said it wouldn’t be like that where we’re going.”

“I don’t care what he said.”

“But we’re not working on a bridge. We’re not even by water, he said. Not too close, anyway.”

Fabrini’s dark skin went red. “Listen to yourself, would ya? For chrissake, you dumb shit, he’ll say anything. Didn’t you notice how he didn’t mention any of this shit until we were in the middle of the Bumfuck Sea? If he’d said it before we sailed, nobody in their right mind would’ve went.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“Damn straight I’m right” He pulled off his shoes and threw them against the bulkhead. A few flakes of gray paint chipped free. “Sometimes, man, I wish I was still in stir”

Menhaus said nothing. He was thinking about Talia, his wife. She’d never bore him any children. Had a vicious tongue and an ass the size of a bus. He was thinking about that ass, thinking how he’d miss it if anything went wrong. Right now he wanted more than anything to hear her call him a lazy good-for-nothing slob. The idea of it made him want to cry.

“Starting right now, buddy,” Fabrini said, “you and me watch each other’s backs. Fuck the rest of ‘em. We’re coming out of this alive. And when we get back to New Orleans, we’re going to get us a couple hookers and get drunk for three pissing days. We’ll get some nice young ones, hear? Tight asses.”

Fabrini turned the light off and stared into the darkness.

Menhaus was thinking he didn’t give a damn about tight asses. He wanted Talia’s ass and her mouth and all the shit combined which made a life. It was all he saw now. All he wanted to see.

They laid there silently for a time, listening to Cook snore.

Fabrini got back up, went to the porthole. He couldn’t see a thing out there. He paced back and forth, then sat back down again. “Dammit,” he said.

“What’s eating you?” Menhaus asked him.

Fabrini was breathing hard in the darkness. “I don’t know… I gotta funny feeling or something. I got the chills here.”

Menhaus did, too. “Me, too. I feel like I got the willies something awful,” he admitted.

And whatever it was, it was growing, filling the air, inundating the ship and drowning the men one by one.

After a time, Menhaus nervously said, “Hey, Fabrini? You hear the one about the gay rabbi who wanted a sex change?”

In the pilothouse, Iverson had forgotten about his Hustler. Forgotten about tits and ass and everything in-between. He’d been feeling groggy when Gosling came in, knowing he was pulling the dogwatch and thinking how far away morning was, sucking down a lot of coffee.

But now he was wide awake and it had nothing to do with caffeine.

Radio was out. Satnav and Satcom off-line. Compass fucked-up. Iverson was a modern sailor. He trusted his instruments, had complete faith in them. And when they were out, it was back to celestial observation and dead reckoning, paper charts and sextants. Back to the jungle. Just like in the old days when a ship at sea might as well have been on another planet. Alone, completely alone.

Iverson sipped his coffee and swallowed.

What he was watching was the radar. The screen had been empty for the past hour, but now it had locked onto something. Something big, something spreading out for miles and miles it seemed. Something like a bank of fog that was like no bank of fog Iverson had ever seen. Even the radar’s computer was having trouble telling exactly what it was. It was not solid, certainly, it was a gaseous envelope like a patch of mist… yet much denser. And the Mara Corday was steaming right into it.

Twice now, Iverson had made to call up the old man, but had hesitated. What could he say? A bank of fog? Jesus H. Christ, Iverson, you called me up here to look at a bank of fog? No, he couldn’t call the captain in on this. Besides, Gosling had the deck and you didn’t want to be going over his head. Gosling wasn’t the sort you wanted to piss off. Gosling saw the fog coming. He’d seen it first and it was he who told Iverson that, the way it was expanding and the rate it was moving at – an unprecedented sixty-knots, if radar was reading it right – there was no way they could get around it. Whatever it was, it had them. Had them tight, by Jesus.

“Besides, for chrissake,” Gosling had said. “What the hell am I going to tell the skipper? We steamed twenty miles off course to avoid some fucking mist?”

Sure, that made sense.

But it didn’t make Iverson feel any better. Because it was almost on them now and he could see it filling the screen, opening up to swallow them like the jaws of some immense beast.

Iverson began to pray under his breath.

George Ryan and Cushing were forward, up near the bow watching the ship cut into the flat, glassy waters.

“This isn’t bad at all,” George said. “I could handle sailing in seas like this.”

Cushing smiled. “Don’t get your hopes up. It won’t last. A freak calm, that’s all.”

George suddenly narrowed his eyes and peered into the night. “Check it out,” he said.

“You see that?”

It was like somebody had strung up a rolling white tarp in the distance. It was getting larger by the second, blotting out everything, eating the darkness and the sea foot by foot.

“Fogbank,” Cushing said, unsure.

George had never seen anything like it. It was a huge, undulating blanket of yellow-white mist, sparkling and luminous. It took his breath away. Within a minute or so, you could see nothing else. It was like the heavens, clouds and all, had fallen to earth and consumed everything in their path.

“Quite a sight, eh?”

George and Cushing turned. Gosling was standing there, arms folded, his pipe dangling from his lips. He looked strange, tense maybe.