Death, Sleep & the Traveler (6 page)

“Allert,” she called only moments after I re-emerged head and shoulders into the random forces of that bright day, “it’s dangerous to swim when the sea is so rough!”

With a laugh and one upraised slippery arm I acknowledged her concern for my welfare and also conveyed my appreciation of her presence at the edge of the pool where she sat in splendid girlish near-nudity with one childish leg thrust over the water and dripping. I waved again, I snorted, I shook off the water, my shoulders heaved, I struck out to cover the short choppy distance to the glare of the fiery ladder. Gasping repeatedly and
voraciously for breath, and feeling the dead flow of all my returning weight, and managing to catch hold of the hot aluminum that was curled like the horns of some great artificial goat, slowly I dragged myself back to the deck of the pitching ship and to the heat of the white towel which, while I was on the bottom of the pool, she had spread out behind her.

“Allert,” she said as I collapsed face down on the towel, “I am not going into the pool today. It’s too rough. I am not as strong as you are.”

I grunted and rested my cheek on my soft pinkish hands, one of which was pillowing the other, and felt the upper portion of the small seated buttocks fitting tightly into my hollow side while the water trickled slowly from my ears and mouth. I did not need to open my eyes to know she was there, since I could see her with my eyes quite shut: scant and pale blue halter and bikini bottom indistinguishable from underwear, small nubile body hairless and unmarked except for a scar in the shape of a fishhook below her navel, small face whose weight and shape I could contain nicely in one hand, soft intensely black hair concealed now beneath her bathing cap, little white rubber bathing cap with the flaps upraised like those of a pilot’s old-fashioned leather helmet after an arduous flight. Even with the warm water trickling from one of my ears and the pain subsiding from my lungs and the ship pitching and rolling in a ring of bright spray, still in the darkness I could see her perfectly because, as I had long since decided, she was the only other person on the ship I was willing to know.

“Allert,” she said more softly, though we were alone on the stern of the rising and falling ship and alone in the wind and sun, “how does it happen that you are such a smooth lover?”

“You seem to be speaking about oil,” I replied, humming and mouthing the words with pleasure, “and not at all speaking about a man. Shame on you!”

But of course she responded at once to the kindly tone of my chiding by leaning down and placing her lips against the loose fat along my left shoulder and suddenly creating with her mouth, as small as it was, a sensation of extreme and pointed suction. Then she rested her cheek where her mouth had been and sighed, stretched out beside me and began gently stroking me in the rolls of fat along my ribs. Her cheek on my shoulder was like a wafer in a field of snow.

“Allert,” she whispered, as we lay there under a curving sheet of bright spray, “let’s go down to my cabin right now and strip off our clothes. Shall we?”

Her name, as I learned inevitably and fairly soon in the voyage, was Ariane. I thought that the name Ariane was quite typical of those elegant names bestowed so often on female children in poor families. At once I recognized the name for the type it was, and recognized its purpose, its poor taste, its pathos. At once I found the name extremely appealing because of its simplicity and sentimentality).

Ariane was the name of the young woman I knew so
emotionally and so briefly on the cruise. I do not find the name appealing now.

“Allert,” Peter said, “I have a request. I would like to give you and Ursula an in-depth psychological test. Ursula agrees. And, after all, there is no reason why our friendship should not further my line of work. You must admit that the two of you would be excellent subjects. What do you say?”

He was smoking his pipe. I was smoking my cigar. Peter’s darkened study smelled as if everything in it was constructed not of wood and leather, which was actually the case, but of compressed blocks of rich and acrid tobacco. Green tobacco, I thought, searching for my friend’s profile in the unlighted room, remarkable green tobacco evocative of the time when I myself was a helpless boy.

“You know what I think of psychiatrists,” I said with the cigar not inches from my waiting lips. “But for you, my friend, anything. In the right company I have nothing to hide.”

Unfortunately Peter was not able to administer the test before his death.

My life has always been uncensored, overexposed. Each event, each situation, each image stands before me like a piece of film blackened from overexposure to intense light. The figures within my photographic frames are slick but charred. In the middle of the dark wood I am a golden horse lying dead on its side across the path and rotting.

“Why do I have the impression that we two are the only people on board this ship?”

“Perhaps because you are not in general friendly, Allert.”

“But I am remarkably friendly as you well know.” “Besides, you are certainly aware of the officers and crew. You are aware of them all the time.”

“Perhaps after all these years I am jealous.”

“Poor Allert, there is no need to be.”

Peter, who was lean and naked, bent his knees and clasped his ankles and arched his spine and drew himself into his favorite Yoga position. His lap formed a broad and angular receptacle bearing his genitals which, I noted, lay there like some kind of excreted pile of waste fired in a blazing kiln and then varnished.

“The one thing you ought to know, Peter,” Ursula was saying, “is that Allert and I go very well together in bed. We always have.”

Ursula’s honesty was quite enough to shatter the glaze on Peter’s genitals.

My cheeks were burning from the wind and sun, my lungs were filled with the smell of the sea. It was dusk and I was returning from my newly discovered place of utter privacy, a position on the bow of the ship concealed by the wheels and plates of a great winch painted with thick and glistening black paint. I had watched the sun lowering in
the western quadrant, I had detected no clue of approaching land. Was I free or lost, exhilarated or merely flushed with grief? I did not know. I did not know what to make of myself or of all these elements, these details, this fresh but oddly traumatic moment of sunset, except to intuit that I was more youthful and yet closer to death than I had ever been. At least my feelings were mixed, to say the least, when I inserted the brass key in the lock of my cabin door. The porthole, which gave only onto the deck, was sealed.

I saw immediately the small photograph lying undisturbed on the flat leather surface of my locked and as yet unpacked valise. Each object was in itself quite ordinary, the valise, the photograph, though taken together, the one on top of the other, each diminished in some small way the reality of the other, or at least altered it. With my hand on the brass door handle, and my hair and figure still disheveled from the touch of the now vanished wind, standing in this way just inside my cabin and seeing the photograph on the valise which in its turn lay on its stand, it was then that a new dictum passed slowly through my mind to the effect that the smallest alteration in the world of physical objects produces the severest and most frightening transformation of reality. Compared with the sight of the photograph curling slightly at the edges and lying somewhat off-center in the field of golden leather—ordinary, improbable, inexplicable, ringed with invisible chains of unanswerable questions—actual vandalism of my silent cabin, had it in fact occurred, would have been nothing.

I sat on my bed, leaned forward, and took the edge of the aging photograph between my thumb and index finger.
I held it as one might hold the wings of a submissive butterfly. Slowly I brought the photograph within range of my unemotional scrutiny. The two small white figures, like fading maggots, were apparently devouring each other sexually with carnivorous joy. I brought the picture closer to my quiet eye and stared at the crack that ran like a bolt of lightning across the glazed emulsion of the much-handled print. After a few more moments of study, I made up my mind that this was a different photograph from the one produced surreptitiously by the wireless officer in the dining saloon, though I could not be sure. It seemed to me that the figures were smaller now and more suggestive of another century.