The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men (15 page)

But the road at Gbambhala is no more than eight inches above grade. It gives an unobstructed view of the beach. On our left is the town, separated from us by a flooded ditch with numerous plank bridges. A mob of children chases our jeep past hanging clothes, cook fires, and the tangle of ropes that seem to hold the encampment together. Sammy looks like an adult as he drives, sounding the
horn with an air of grave responsibility and waving casually at the youngsters who chase us like tattered ghosts. On the right are the ships, twenty medium-sized cargo vessels already grounded and another sixty trawlers and smaller craft being picked apart. Among the sharp-angled shadows of late afternoon we can see figures swarming over each corpse like an army of ants. That’s the first thing that comes to mind; but they do not look like beached whales, these ships. They look like toppled buildings. Or like train wrecks at the edge of the ocean. And at first you cannot grasp what has happened because it does not seem logical that human beings would deliberately create this kind of destruction.

Sammy tells me that Robert N’mburo is supervising the lifting of the propeller shaft from the engine room of one of the freighters. We drive to the high tide line and begin to walk the rest of the way. They’ve made a path of palm fronds in honor of my visit. Everything has been arranged.

Farther out to sea are the silhouettes of another hundred vessels, all waiting for a vacant slot on the beach, some anchored, one already building up cruising speed. We stop and listen to the radioman fifty yards below us. He’s directing the captain and engineer on a tanker that seems to be headed away from shore. “
Sendai Maru
, what is your heading?”

A barely recognizable English squawk comes back to him, “Heading two nine zero.”

“Very well. Your distance from the port ship?”

“Eight cables. Closing to seven cables. Seven point oh.”

“Very well,
Sendai
. Come to course zero-four-zero. Ahead one half.”

“Zero-four-zero. Ahead one half.”

The radioman drives a blinking red beacon into the sand as the huge ship begins its turn and gathers speed. Someone calls off course changes in degrees. A few men in
lungis
and turbans wander down to our section of beach to watch. After ten minutes the radioman gives
a new set of instructions. “
Sendai
, come to one-one-zero. Ahead two-thirds. Please confirm, you are ballasting, yes?”

“Course one-one-zero. Ahead two-thirds. We are continuing to ballast, and we have your light.”

“Very well, call out your course.”

The ship seems to grow shorter as its bow swings to face us; then, for a long time, it seems not to be moving at all. There is another exchange of numbers over the radio and an acknowledgment from the captain that he is giving full power. The ship itself appears to be no closer to shore than it was twenty minutes before, though its shape has changed to a dark and bulging V atop a churning foam. Soon the bow wake resembles a cat’s paw flicking at the water ahead. Then it becomes more of a sound pushing the men back from the wavelets. They plod upslope in twos and threes, as if to prove that they do not yet need to run. The rushing torrent of my imagination gradually becomes a jetlike roar competing with the engine’s deep thumthumthum, both sounds merging at last into a concussion that seems to have swept in from some World War II battlefield, a sound that is not so much sound as it is a physical pressure in the lungs, a rhythm in the stomach. It is the moment that language becomes useless. As the V expands into a mountainous slope of metal, the wake itself reaches us first as a fine mist that we inhale and then wipe from our faces. When the keel strikes bottom, there is not the shriek that I expect but rather a totally unexpected slippage to one side as if the
Sendai Maru
had suddenly decided to avoid an unpleasant puddle. As the stern fishtails, the bow continues its slow progress, another indication of the vast power that has been put in play.

Some of the sand spills to either side like a huge furrow being cut into the face of the earth, but most of it simply disappears under the broadening shadow of the hull, now rising impossibly high above us. A shallow depression forms for thirty yards on both sides of the prow, which the tide and the ship’s own bilges immediately fill. It is as though a giant has suddenly stepped away from the shore and nature
now rushes to seal the vacuum. Long after the propeller loses its purchase, the
Sendai Maru
continues her course inland, her plates groaning under an earthly weight that they were never designed to bear and revealing a crusty underside that no one is meant to see.

I have heard that, from time to time, a man will break away from the crowd and rush down the shore as one of these ships emerges from the water under full power and is no longer controllable by the hand of any pilot. Whether from an excess of bravado or out of a desire to commit suicide, it is impossible to say. He stares out to sea as if indifferent to the danger or hypnotized by the prospect of something better and far away. Then, when the ship makes that final sideways lurch, he is either spared by blind chance or else simply annihilated, ground into the sand by abrasions above and below. In either case, he is rarely seen again.

I know of course that the
Sendai Maru
has never been animated by anything other than her engines, but in the sudden silence I am struck by the paradox that something has indeed just died. For a moment no one moves. It’s like the awkward hush at graveside after the last prayer and the benediction. And I know that in the morning’s low tide tiny creatures will swarm over this ship and begin to dismantle the body. But for one shared moment we keep quiet, each one of us with his private thoughts. Even I, counting what has been lost.

It is one of the sad and fundamental principles of maritime law that a ship out of water is no longer a ship, but a heap of metal. Like a marriage out of love.

Sammy steers me toward another ship farther down the beach.

We reach Robert N’mburo’s wreck by walking over a plank pathway thrown across deep ruts in the sand and then after a few moments by wading to a rough scaffolding. Sammy takes off his sandals and throws them on the beach. I roll my trousers and tie my shoes to the briefcase because I remember reading that most deaths in the shipbreaking industry actually occur from tetanus and bacterial infections that began
in simple cuts. I will return to my shoes as soon as I reach deck and then will watch my step thereafter. From that one thought arises a mild concern that grows, as we ascend the scaffolding, into a unreasoning fear that literally no one in the world knows where I am. I could slip and fall into the sea at any moment; I could be electrocuted by any one of the land lines snaking from arc lamps on deck down into the water and across the beach to a sputtering generator; or I could step onto a metal gangway that collapses like a fire escape tearing loose from rotting bricks and mortar. No one would know, because I’ve lied to Narissa and put myself into the hands of a child named Sammy. I could die like one of the workers. And for the first time I realize that I could be replaced just as easily.

I go over the railing and onto the deck with slow and careful movements, clutching the briefcase as if it were an infant.

Below us a man climbs the anchor chain with no more effort than someone climbing a flight of stairs. He disappears into the hawsehole, and after a moment comes the crackle of an acetylene torch and the haunting glow of blue-white light, as if he had been a ghost opening the door of another world. Already the ship has been relieved of her wood, glass, plastic, rubber, porcelain, canvas, hemp, copper, brass, and silver. What is left is a world of iron and a world of iron sounds. We have to shout now to hear each other because most of the “cutting” at this stage is done with sledgehammers. Acetylene torches are rare and precious in this part of the world, and they are dangerous, slicing into pockets of every vaporized chemical that can be hauled by ship and not infrequently exploding. This ship, like most, is simply being beaten apart and hauled away by hand, a process that takes up to a year for the supertankers that are the prized treasure-ships of men like Robert N’mburo, and the principal killers of his men. As we stand on the half-deck and peer into the canyon beneath us, it is like looking into a village that had been bombed from the air.

We step through a maze of cables and descend the first stair to a point perhaps twelve feet below the scuppers, a place that’s shadowed
by the uppermost hull plates and where we pause to adjust our eyes like men stepping into a darkened theater. In this dim twilight we have to be careful to step over buckets of bolts, coiled electrical wires, and one-inch steel plates stacked like rusty playing cards. Below us are more landings and more metal stairs, all taking odd turns and occasionally hanging like catwalks where former walls have been stripped away. The infrequent shafts of light coming from portholes resemble spotlights focused on the backstage machinery of an experimental drama, and I feel like an actor descending to some unseen production by M. C. Escher. The hammering, which should have echoed like gunshots, becomes no more than a faint tinkling, perhaps muffled by the insane geometry of the demolition or perhaps simply swallowed by the immensity of the ship. It is like walking into a skyscraper that someone has left lying on its side. I go with one hand on a railing and one, where possible, flat against the inner hull. Down and down, past cabins and storage holds, at each level getting a glimpse of the antmen at work, some banging with sledges, some hauling out miles of intestines, some carrying away iron slabs like leaf-cutters deep in the Amazon.

At last we reach a narrow passage leading through two iron hatches to the orlop, a half-deck just above the bilges where waste spills into the open ocean twenty feet below. The entire stern of our ship has already been cut away, and the unguarded view of the outer harbor, in less dangerous circumstances, might have looked like early evening from one of the antiseptic balconies of a cruise ship. There are the murmuring breakers below us, the quaint commercial vessels at a distance, and a reddening sun that must be setting Brazil ablaze. High above the artificial horizon is our evening star, a sparkling hole in the hull where a torch has just cut through. The sparks fall for thirty feet and then skid down the inner hull like marbles of molten glass.

Someone behind us says, “It looks like an amphitheater, doesn’t it?”

The unexpected accent startles me more than actual violence would have done, and the man’s demeanor seems almost as alien as my own.
Taller than Sammy, and far more substantial in body, he resembles in my imagination a professional athlete or an American diplomat who has dressed in the local costume for an afternoon of celebrity touring.

“Whenever I look up from this point,” he continues, “I always think of one of those paintings of nineteenth-century surgeries, you know, the ones with the medical students peering down into the pit, the one light playing off the surgeon in his bloody apron and cravat—and of course the very pale lady on the table.” He chuckles at some private amusement and extends a hand.

“Charles Allemand,” I say. “You must be Mr. N’mburo.”

“Yeah. For about a year now. Before that I was a white guy like you.” The man I had come four thousand miles to meet waits to see if I will laugh. He studies me with an intensity that would have been considered rude, even insulting, in most African cultures. “You look a little wet,” he says. “Why don’t you chuck that overboard,” he nods at my briefcase, “and let’s sit and talk for a while. I’ve got a feeling you’re going to miss your flight.”

His words are both casual and sinister, like those of a soldier who’s grown indifferent to death and to high-sounding causes. When he comes closer, I see that fate has in fact touched him. There is a bandage hanging loose at one palm like a boxer’s hand wrapping. A gray scar over his left eye. And as he walks it becomes apparent that he favors one leg and that he is gradually being bent under whatever weight he has chosen to bear. Still, there’s nothing wounded about his voice, and he speaks like a man who expects his words to have an effect. He lowers himself to his haunches and rests his elbows on his knees the way I had seen the Bassa people doing in pictures.

I say to him, “Maybe you’ll forgive me for suggesting that you’re not exactly what I expected.”

“No shit?”

“You’re American?”

“Used to be. Used to be a lot more than that.”

“I see.”

“I doubt that, chief. I doubt you have any idea what you’re seeing.”

“Look, Mr. N’mburo, or Mr….”

“Rosello. Can you believe that? Somewhere along the line my family must have been owned by the only slaveholders in Brooklyn. You think that might have been it? Now, I myself find the name Robert Rosello far stranger than anything I’m about to tell you.”

“I appreciate that. But I want you to understand that I’m not here to do anything other than …”

“I know why you’re here. I even have an idea of how much you’re getting paid to cradle your little briefcase. I could tell old Sammy there, but he wouldn’t believe that there’s that much money in the world. This is a strange place, Chuck. A very strange place indeed. I want you to think about that. Then toss your goodies out into the surf there. And then listen carefully.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

“Let me ask you something. Have things been going well for you since you got here?”

“How do you mean?”

“Me, I had a headache for weeks. Sinus, diarrhea, heat exhaustion. It takes a while to adapt, let me tell you. Then, after you adapt, it’s a pretty good sign that you’re going to end up like everybody else around here. Seen anything yet that makes you want to stay?”

“If I could just get you to sign these papers …”

“Chuck, listen to me. I’m the guy they sent out here before you.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t …”

“Listen to what I’m saying. I want you to toss the papers. Tell them nobody’s signing anything. Tell them the breaking yard is staying open.”