John Hawkes: Death, Sleep & the Traveler

But there is no image or analogy with which to evoke the taste of water, which happens to correspond to the view I hold generally of life. The thought of salt water is unbearable to me. My desire for fresh water is increasing daily. I number myself among those few men who are able to admit that their thirst is unquenchable.

“Allert,” Peter said, “what do you think of my theory that a man remains a virgin until he has committed murder?”

There were two life jackets stored on the top shelf of the narrow closet in my cabin. Staring into the closet that was nearly empty except for the life jackets, and also staring into the mirror fastened to the inside of the closet door, in this way I saw myself in the mirror in my undershorts. I imagined myself strapped into one of the orange jackets, I thought of myself tying the white cords in the darkness of a night at sea. It pleased me to think that I had lost track of time.

And yet the sight of two life jackets caused me a certain uneasiness, as did the two pillows on the bed, the two chairs covered with flowered chintz, the smell of soap and sea air in the cabin, the absence of anything personal in this cabin that was obviously intended for two persons but occupied by only one. I did not wish the company of the other shipboard passengers, and yet I believed that I would never feel at home in a stateroom with so much false decoration and from which some second unknown person was forever missing.

I replaced one of the white cords that was dangling. I dropped my shorts, I felt the humming of the ship in the soles of my feet, I prepared myself in trunks, straw slippers, dark glasses and white terry cloth robe for a session at the edge of the ship’s pool. I drank from the plastic glass-lined flask of ice water. I studied myself through the large black lenses of the sunglasses.

Then I left my cabin. I took my towel, my straw hat, my book, and even as I detoured down to the deck below instead of walking directly to the pool that was situated on my own deck in the aft of the ship, I found myself distrusting what appeared to be the monotony of the ship’s steady course. The curious levitation I felt in the softly lit corridor was sure to give way to some abrupt shock or a sudden diminution of forward speed and then a pause and then the terrible pull of the propellers churning in reverse. A clear day was no guarantee against the diving and rising monsters of the deep.

The length of the corridor was spanned underfoot by a thin rubber mat and overhead by a series of muted light bulbs in steel cages. A fire axe was bolted to the bulkhead behind a sheet of glass. I could hear my slippers marking my solitary progress down the corridor. Through the thickly-smoked lenses of my dark glasses the details of the corridor were so darkly obliterated that it might have been leading me through some unfamiliar hotel or through the severe structure of a bad dream, except that the corridor was not level, following as it did the contours of the white hull, and in the very nuclear substance of its steel plates was filled with all the physical by-products of the stresses of what could be nothing other than a ship in motion on a flat sea.

Her cabin door was open. Hardly able to see my way, smelling fresh paint and the grease of electrical cables and the fresh lingering scent of my recent shower, I knew immediately that her cabin door was open, not hooked partially ajar with a brass hook as were many of the doors I passed, but standing fully open so that I could not help but see the partially opened porthole, the pen and loose sheets of paper on the writing desk, the archaic typewriter, the orange beach robe flung on a chair, the small and still dripping swim suit dangling from one of the thick brass ring-bolts around the porthole. I could not help but see the wireless officer half propped on the unmade bed in his tunic and undershorts, and see also the young woman who, dressed in a boy’s white undershirt and a pair of tight blue denim pants, was standing before a small ironing board and pressing what were obviously the wireless officer’s white trousers.

Her hair was still damp. Her rump was a little sectioned fruit in the tight blue pants, her feet were bare, her energetic upper body was like a child’s. The wireless officer was reading something, a book or magazine, on her unmade bed. She was ironing his white trousers as if to do so were a commonplace of both the past and present.

When I again reached the upper deck I reversed my direction, shunned the pool, and returned to my cabin where in robe and slippers and dark glasses I lay flat on the flowered bedspread that was stretching like a sterile skin across my empty bed.

I was unable to read. Only considerable inner concentration prevented me from donning one of the orange life jackets over my white robe.

He was at my side. The moonlight was on the rail, on the deck, on the waves and foam below us, and the wireless officer was at my side. One of his white shoes was hooked on a lower rung of the ship’s rail.

“Sometimes, when a man is in the winter of life,” he said, “he begins to find young women attractive. He begins to pursue younger and younger women. He intrudes where he is not wanted. He finds himself unable to seduce the girl away from the younger man. He attempts unsuccessfully to be their friend, burning all the while only to touch the girl. He makes a fool of himself.”

I thought of the moonlight turning the sea’s black salt to silver, for an instant I saw the crumpled white uniform streaked with algae. In the moonlight he was picking his fingernails with a small bone-colored cuticle stick.

“If you think I am in the winter of life, as you put it,” I said, suppressing my anger, “you are mistaken. Very much mistaken.”

“Allert,” Peter said, breathing his frozen breath into the silence between us, “I would like to take you up on your suggestion. Do you remember?”

In woolen socks and rubber boots cut off at the knee and with silver-barreled shotguns cradled in our arms that were bent and stuffed with warm padding like the arms of gigantic male dolls, thus Peter and I were walking across the pre-dawn snow, side by side. He was smoking his little curved white meerschaum pipe with the amber stem. The lines of elegance on his long face appeared to have been skillfully cut by a pointed instrument into Spanish leather.

“Yes,” he said, “I accept your proposal. Ursula and I will welcome the regularity.”

A single compact bird flew low over our heads and away in a long curving trajectory of great speed. Peter’s breath was like snow that had undergone sudden transformation, the little round white bowl of his pipe reminded me of the gonad of some child god, a second bird skimmed by in pursuit of the first. And still he and I walked on together, contemplating the closeness achieved by certain psychic ties.

It was then, after we had walked perhaps another hundred yards, that I had my vision of Peter sealed at last in his lead box but with his penis bursting through the roof of the box like an angry asphodel.

On my way to the pool, which was small but deep and constructed in the shape of a slippery amoeba, I steadied myself against the pitch and roll of the bone-colored wooden deck and glanced up toward the projecting wing of the ship’s bridge, where I saw him, hatless, black hair curling in the bright wind, arms on the rail, foot raised and resting on the white rung, tunic unbuttoned at the throat, bitter young eyes directed toward some invisible point off the prow of the ship, the kind of young wireless operator who would one day soon deserve the severest sentence of some maritime tribunal. I wondered what pocket in his tunic, left or right, contained one of the famous photographs. Clearly he was enjoying himself and not on duty.