Peter Geye - Safe from the Sea

“Now, I don’t care if you have two minutes or two days to make decisions when you’re in a mess like that, the fact is, there just aren’t a whole lot of options. You asked me if I thought I was going to die. If I’d had the time, I might’ve. But I didn’t. I had to decide whether to launch the lifeboats or get back with the rest of the crew on the bow.”

“Why would you have done that?”

“They were my crewmates,” Olaf said without hesitation. “I was an officer aboard a ship in peril.”

The notion of the crew’s importance touched an unidentifiable nerve in Noah. “I don’t understand,” he said. “Crossing back to the bow would have meant leaving the lifeboats. If you leave the lifeboats, you’ve got positively no chance.”

“That’s true if you know the boat is sinking. We didn’t.”

Noah shook his head. “You didn’t know you were sinking? You’re on the rocks, the lifeboats are ten feet from where you’re standing, half the crew is already dead — probably dead, anyway — and you hesitate to get off the ship?”

“They were my goddamn crewmates, I wanted to save them more than I wanted to save myself. How could I have helped anyone by getting into a lifeboat and rowing into the goddamn night?”

“How did you intend to save them by leaving behind the only means of escape?”

Olaf was clearly riled. “Oh, hell, I don’t know. Maybe I thought there would be safety in numbers, maybe I thought one of those lifeboats out on the open water would have been suicide — I mean, hell, it nearly was. Or maybe I just didn’t know what to do. There’s no manual for surviving the end of the world.” He balled both hands into lopsided fists and pounded them against his legs.

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” he concluded. “No sooner had the four of us met back on the deck than we came off the rocks. As soon as we did, I knew exactly what we had to do.”

Noah got up again, went to the kitchen, and wiped his face with a dish towel. Outside, it was dark, and Noah caught a glimpse of his reflection in the window. His hair was messy and on end, and he looked drunk. He hadn’t shaved since he’d left Boston, and his stubble darkened his chin. His eyes were slack but bright. There was fog on the outside of the window, and he figured it would have been frost if not for the heat inside.

“Understand something,” Olaf said, “until we got off the rocks, I still had the notion that everything was going to come together. I still thought — and it’s easy to see how ludicrous this sounds in hindsight — that somehow we could come out of it, you know? That we could avoid the end. Stupid, but it’s true.

“And another thing, contrary to conventional wisdom, when you’re on the edge of life — like that — and falling off, you don’t stop and reminisce. At least I didn’t. What you do is look for something to hold on to.”

Noah hoisted himself up onto the kitchen counter and crossed his legs. “I guess,” he said but didn’t understand. The notion that the old man’s crew of nobodies should take precedence over his mother and sister and himself still didn’t make sense.

“And maybe there was a chance up until we came free, you know? Maybe everything going through my head wasn’t just fear or indecision.”

Noah thought, He’s pleading. Maybe not to me, but he is.

“It’s all the same, though, like I said, because when we did come off the rocks, all I wanted to do was get off that goddamn boat. It was the only thing left to do.”

Noah looked up at him. “So that’s when you knew she was going down.”

“There wasn’t much doubt about it. I mean, despite the fact that we couldn’t see a thing, you could tell she was wallowing.” He paused. “Whenever I imagine what she must have looked like from God’s view, all I can see is the dying light.”

“How fast did it happen?”

“Can’t say for sure, but between the four of us we couldn’t have gotten the lifeboat launched in any less than fifteen or twenty minutes, and considering how far from the rocks she ended up, it was probably a little longer than that.”

“Not enough time for any of the other ships to get there?”

“No way.”

“Or the Coast Guard?”

“What were they going to do even if they’d been able to get there? Searching for us on a night like that would’ve been like looking for a cotton ball in a cloud. They never would have found us.”

“And the rest of the crew?” Noah asked, almost in a whisper.

“Don’t know what happened,” Olaf said and put his head down.

They sat in silence for a while before Noah slid off the counter and went back to the armchair. “You look tired,” he said.

“I’m always tired.”

“I’m tired, too,” he said, looking at his watch to find that it was only six o’clock. “Why don’t you get some sleep?”

“I think I will,” Olaf said. “Give me a hand, would you?”

Noah skirted around the coffee table and took his father by the elbow. His arm was thin and soft. Noah helped him around the table.

“Gotta hit the head,” Olaf said.

“Me, too.”

“You know, I never thought much about it, but the worst part of the whole goddamn night came after we got the lifeboat in the water.”

They walked to the door and stood in the dusky light coming off the kitchen, pushing their feet into a pile of unlaced boots by the door.

“ That’s the real story,” Olaf said.

“Why don’t you save that part for another time, huh?”

“It was a hell of a thing, you know? A hell of a thing.”

“I’ve no doubt about that,” Noah said as he pushed the door open. The air was biting, and no sooner did Noah step outside than his body drew taut and a shiver rippled up his back and through his shoulders.

They walked to the edge of the glow from the house and stood next to each other beside a tree, their shoulders almost touching.

“Already stars in the west,” Olaf said, pointing through the trees. “It’s going to clear up.”

“Hopefully warm up, too.”

“What, it doesn’t get cold in Boston?”

“Of course it does, it’s just that we usually hold off on the snow until winter.”

“Ah, hell, that wasn’t snow.”

“It looked like snow to me. It got me thinking about your dog.” Noah could picture Vikar somewhere in the middle of the woods, wet and bloody-muzzled, devouring a freshly slain rabbit.

“Don’t worry about him. He’s been roaming these woods for a long time now,” Olaf said as he climbed the three rickety wooden steps back into the house. Noah held him steady by the elbow.

When he opened the door, Noah could feel the warm air surge out of the house. The blustery evening had cleared Noah’s head — had invigorated him — and when he stepped back into the house, he thought it smelled like boiling rutabaga. It was a smell that reminded him of his mother and the dreaded Friday-night fish boils of his childhood. He was instantly sapped again.

He kicked off the boots and sat back down on the couch while Olaf filled a glass jar with water from the pitcher. He drank it, then filled it again, took two chalky tablets from a canister on the counter, and dropped them into the jar. Finally he dug into his mouth and pulled his teeth out and dropped them in the jar.

“What?” Noah said. “Since when do you have dentures?”

“Six years ago. I hate the goddamn things,” Olaf said, picking up the jar and holding it to the light. His lips seemed baggier without his teeth, and it made him look even older.

Noah ran his tongue across the front of his own teeth. “I didn’t know you had them.”

“I guess you wouldn’t.”

“I guess not.”