Michael Christie - If I Fall, If I Die

Still he did not move.

“Come,” Vadim said, extending his hand deeper, “except know that Visser will not turn the boat around for a clumsy trimmer. He is crazy to escape the Lakes before the freeze. But our next call is Sault Sainte Marie. There you depart.”

Fully awake now, he shook his head and made a shooing motion.

Confusion took Vadim as he retracted his arm. His face was thickly creased and featured a handful of lumpy moles, though rather than dark, they were the same color as his flesh. It was an untroubled face, a boy’s face, except for his nose, which was like a stepped-on cherry.

“You were loading boat, yes? You are grain trimmer? Thunder Bay? You fell?”

“Not exactly,” he said.

“Good! You talk! I was worried you hit this head or were too stupid. Still, you go ashore at the Sault. Otherwise, you go farther than you want.” Vadim extended his hand again into the hold.

“I’m comfortable here,” he said, patting the heaped edges of his nest. They still weren’t far enough out for him to jump.

“But this is salted,” Vadim said.

“This is what?”

“I thought you worked the Lake?”

He didn’t answer.

“I’m meaning this is ocean vessel.”

“Look, don’t fuss over me,” he said, “I’ll find my own way off soon enough.”

“In North Atlantic? Don’t you care to know your heading?”

“No.”

He laughed. “A fatalist.”

“How do you mean?”

“It means you are someone who does not worry forward. Look, I am from Ukraine, Odessa, but this is Dutch boat. This oats is a backhaul to Africa. Then our last port of call is Delfzijl. Trust me, fatalist, you do not want to make vacations there.”

“No difference to me,” he said. “Best way to help me is to forget me.”

Vadim’s face darkened. “It is no good for you to do this stowing. You do not want to be discovered by Visser.” Then Vadim lowered himself to sit on the edge of the hatch and related a story of Visser, the ship’s chief mate, a Dutchman who once found a stowaway on a saltie outbound from Singapore and kicked each of the man’s teeth out, including molars, before pitching him into the water with his clothes in shreds. “You don’t want to know what he would do to yourself. On the ocean there is no law. And Visser is worse than nothing.”

Someone called to Vadim from up on the deck, and he leapt up and answered in a language that was different still from his accent.

“Oh well,” said Vadim squatting again. “Even fatalist ghosts require water. I bring water.”

“I’m fine.”

“No, no, you’ll be murdered by thirst. Say no to refusing. This I will do for you.” He took the hatch in his hands and swung it half closed. “Sorry, it must be locked for the grain is kept dry. If not, I will become in troubled. But I won’t linger.”

“Dark suits me fine,” he said.

“And sir?” Vadim added. “Don’t sink.”

“Isn’t that your job?”

“No, no. In there. Stay flat! Like ah, how do you say … snowshoe? Don’t flip around too much,” he said and shut the hatch.

He spent that night spread-eagled on the surface of the oats, allowing himself only a thin layer to banish the chill, not because he wanted to live, but because he’d been buried in grain many times before and didn’t want to die with oats stopping his nose and throat. He was certain he deserved something much, much worse.

The storm started as a hungry wind drumming the hull. He’d heard sailors oftentimes declare November on Superior a war of wave and fog and sleet, home to a cold that could freeze eyes into cubes. Next came hail on the deck above like buckets of ball bearings dumped out to be sorted. He stuffed oats in his ears to dampen the racket.

After a few hours of pitching, nausea arrived, hot and delirious. Despite his time at the harbor, he’d never been on a boat other than weekend fishing jaunts on small, tepid lakes. When his mouth flooded with saliva he crawled away from the hatch into the deeper dark and emptied his stomach into a hole he’d dug in the oats.

He waited for the sickness to pass, his back propped against the curved wall of the hold, trying to stabilize the brain in his skull with placid thoughts, thoughts of her, but couldn’t keep the vileness in him now from touching her image, so he punched the steel hull until his mind shut off. With so much vomiting, his thirst had reached a deadliness even he could recognize. You’ll die of thirst on a mountain of food , he thought, and this set him chuckling.

An uncountable time later, his stomach settled into starvation, and he stewed up spit in his mouth for an hour in order to get some oats down, but they sat in a lump low in his sternum like he’d swallowed an apple whole. After eating, he attempted sleep. Hours in the vacuum of dark had opened his senses wide and his eyes took on another purpose. With nothing to land upon they concocted visions, like old prisoners telling stories to keep sane. Soon his eyelids flared with something near light, and amid these specters he watched himself put his own ear to that cable as though to a shell. He’d known it was weakened and tapped at it with a screwdriver, like he knew what he was listening for, while the Indian crew waited, speaking in low tones next to the half-unloaded grainer. “It’s fine,” he’d assured them, well aware the lake could freeze any minute, holding up their scheme until next year. “What are you boys afraid of anyway, a little grain?” he said to his crew, then told his best friend to fire up the car dumper, which he did because they trusted each other like brothers — and a second later the air broke open with the lung-sucking sound of the frayed cable whipping through his friend, his remaining arm clutching at his crushed chest, trying to unlock it, his face scrambled like a painter’s palette. Then his wrecked flesh dimming to white, the life lifting from the pieces of him like frost from the earth on a warm morning.

When the visions ceased, he fell through sleep and wakefulness, as though through the floors of a skyscraper made of mist. When he awoke, the storm had passed, the engines silent. He stood, ready for his last swim, and reached upwards for the hatch, yet even when he stretched tall, his fingers discovered only air. He could tell by the way his voice bounced that the ceiling was much higher than before. The oats must’ve settled in the vibration of the storm, he concluded. He pushed some into an incline and managed a mound from which he was able to graze the hatch with his fingertips. But there was no way to open it from the inside.

Thirst had returned, and he feared it would weaken his capacity to refuse the visions, so he sat telling himself knock-knock jokes he’d shared with her— Lettuce. Lettuce Who? Lettuce in, it’s freezing! — until sleep took him.

“It was all hands last night. There was no way I could come. Then we must go ashore. This was important. But now I’m returned.” It was night, and Vadim was backlit by a needlepoint of stars. The bright smell of alcohol wafted into the hold. Vadim was drunk, and it made his accent harder to unravel.

“I thought: But Vadim, he has oats!” he said raggedly. “And then I remembered: the water! So now? I’ve come.”

He tried to speak but only croaked, dragging his tongue like a dry mop over his lips in a futile attempt to moisten them. Vadim tossed down a jar of water and it landed in the oats with a whump. He couldn’t resist throwing himself upon it but drank conservatively, trying to disguise how pressing his thirst was.

Next, Vadim took out a flashlight, and it was possible to make out some gaps in his grip. “I lose these in the winch,” Vadim said grinning, wiggling his two remaining fingers like a man giving an obscene gesture. Then Vadim directed the flashlight into the hold, stinging his vision. “Ah,” Vadim said, “there you are. Oh no no … you have bleed on your face. Is this new?”