Midway Page 4

  Something blinked on the northern horizon, a single light that dipped behind the waves, and far too low for a star that I knew of. The sun swooned its last rays across a wide and dying crescent, bleeding out through the bruised western sky, and the twinkling plain of water before me that breathed up and down, up and down with a million salty lungs. I had my own parallaxed backdrop, and a moving object that gave me a perspective on distance. Pay attention, I told myself. This might be important.

  I shifted my concentration and straightened up, pushing myself up over the crest of the next wave. A stack of black boxes sat on the horizon with a single light on top. Tower block sized, it was too large to be one of ours. With the lack of illumination decorating the vessel, I squinted and guessed it was a cargo ship, filled to the brim with shipping containers, or cars, or whatever. Staffed by a minimal crew, this lack of eyes looking outward would mean they probably weren’t even aware of my existence. This chilled me. Humans were close, my kin, my kind; souls that could pluck me from this situation and deliver me home like a snivelling, pathetic little puppy after escaping from his new home. The fantasy bloomed of making it aboard and finding the ship completely autonomous. The bridge would be filled with wires, panels, and blinking lights; but no controls. With no crew they’d be no food, and I’d wander the blank corridors and starve until I figured out how to fish off the side, or knock a gull from the sky.

  I paused and tried to gauge their direction. A few seconds passed, and I figured it was passing from the north west to south east, maybe towards South Africa.

  I shouted, I made a noise and waved my arms like a roadside lunatic to let them know I wasn’t a blur in part of the scenery, or a piece of lifeless flotsam. I was human being with a beating, bragging heart who still gave a fuck about breathing fresh air, sharing sunsets, and sleeping close to someone I adored. I demanded to be acknowledged whilst that fire to survive blazed within me. I was a survivor and would continue to be.

  “Hey!”

  I kicked out and tried to close the distance between them and me; cut them off at the pass as they say in the old timey westerns. I hoped to end up where they’d be in a few minutes. The cargo ship got larger, the light got brighter, and my hopes of being plucked from oblivion did likewise. I didn’t care if the only brain on board was electronically minded. I powered on as the ship lay directly east in front of me, wondering what if I’d closed that distance earlier. Would I be where they were now?

  I shook the futile possibility from my head and ploughed on through the darkening brine, angry at the clinging friction that held me back, and the lethargy in my muscles that slowed me down.

  Even with the death of dusk, I got so close I could see the barnacles clinging to rust, and the fading white markings on the side.

  9UNDN15-ODETTA-BLUE

  It meant nothing to me, but it meant everything. That might have been the last thing I ever read. The sound of her engine bubbling away was music to my ears, momentarily lifting my spirits above the grip of the waves. I fantasised about grabbing a stray rope dangling from the side and me being pulled up from the simmering brine, as the jaws of death’s bear trap shut, shearing atoms from my toenails.

  Odetta Blue carried on her churning plough into the southern Atlantic without me, shrinking as suddenly as she’d grown into my life.

  About minute after she passed my line of latitude, a swell passed through me and lifted my body up from the trough, giving me a peek at the horizon and a better vantage point of Odetta Blue as she bobbed her way away from me.

  I sunk back into the trough, receiving a slap in the face from my mistress, the unforgiving sea.

  I watched her go and shed a precious tear, savouring every rising wave that altered my position on this world. For soon it would be full dark, and I would be truly invisible to eyes unaccustomed to the night. I was a Lego behind the sofa. That photo in the attic of an old love you saved and had forgotten about. The penny wedged between the floorboards.

  Gone, forgotten, but still existing. A metaphysical quandary; I was the falling tree in the forest (baobab?), the screaming man in the ocean. If I go mad alone, am I truly mad if no one is around to judge me as mad? The loss of a man’s mind is judged by others, not by the man himself.

  I floated for a while, treading water while I let my drained arms rest. Taken over by darkening purple clouds from the north and west, the fading light finally disappeared, replaced by a fat eyed moon that peeked out every so often from behind grey billows blanketing a starless night. I shivered and mourned the sun. My Fast Skin only kept out so much of the cold. I was naked beneath aside from a pair of Speedos to cover my modesty between suit changes. Helpless and weary, I was soon lost in the rise and fall motions of the silk black ocean, throwing around the hungry acid in my stomach. I sought no course nor was I sure what direction the gentle turbulence of the Atlantic pulled me. I wasn’t giving up. I was fighting off the urge to sleep and dream of another life.

  I thought about the numerous medals, trophies, and accolades I’d gathered during my sporting life, and what good they do me now. They’d doom me, chains around a drowning man’s neck. I’d give them all up for a half a glass of cool, fresh spring water. Hell, I’d give them up to let a tramp spit in my mouth. Maybe not. I wasn’t that desperate. Yet.

  I considered all the other professions I could have ventured. I loved Maths and English at school, if maybe I followed my brain instead of my physical prowess I might be in a different situation right now. A safer and less soul destroying workplace, free of toothed hazards and unknowing; somewhere with good company, hot food and free coffee.

  I could have been a scientist, I pondered, before the dark part of me remembered that scientists built the nuclear bomb and blow smoke into beagles’ eyes. Death follows every profession.

  I licked my lips, surprised at how chapped they felt. The skin had flaked off and curled like a pie crust. I nibbled at them, chewing what I could, telling myself it was all cosmetic, and not the anxious gnaw of hunger.

  I considered taking a tiny sip from the green bottle in my hand and even placed my quaking fingers on the bottle top in a moment of weakness. I resisted. What if I made it through the night? I’d need a drink tomorrow when the midday sun scorched any floating heads like an egg in a pan.

  Not yet. Despite my hatred, this treasure was too precious to waste too quickly. I’d have to savour every hellish, sugary drop.

  ***

  In the darkening of the night I pulled my goggles up and off from my face, rejoicing in the feeling of relief as the cutting pressure was released from my skin. With removal of the polarised goggles, my eyes let in a little more light, giving a measure of more details of the surrounding sinister gloam. I stretched my eyes and mouth, cracked my tight jaw, and faced skyward. Then I cried. I’d lost count of how many times I’d wasted precious grief. I told myself it was cathartic, a form of self-help therapy to mourn the loss of my crew, and own impending demise. I soldiered on. Have a little cry, have a little swim. Have a little cry, have a little swim. I even tried to drink my tears by picking them off with the tips of my fingers. I needed a routine to fix my mind in place on this whirling Earth.

  But right now I felt pitiful and useless, adrift in a dark and lonely ocean, waiting for sleep to pull me in, and the water to take me under. I even considered the possibility that I may have died and all this was my own private kind of hell. Maybe dawn would never arrive, and I’d simply exist in this 5/6ths-wet-purgatory-forever-nightfall-universe.

  Below and behind, something touched me, a brief, sliding nudge that clung to my left calf for a moment, then a tug that filled my mind with spinning teeth and sucking tentacles. I shrieked and recoiled, drawing my knees up like an old maid frightened by a scurrying mouse, the cold touch of fear shocking its way up my spine.

  Nothing came of it, and I breathed out a breath that seemed to empty me of everything, barring my bones. Maybe I’d only imagined whatever had brushed past the back of my legs. I hoped and
prayed to whatever God that oversaw this realm of reality that my cramp was on its way back and not some curious beast wanting to quench its hunger for lonesome Englishmen. Maybe a shoal of fish or a wandering turtle I reasoned, drawing breath again. Seaweed, it must have been seaweed.

  A few weeks before my trip I’d watched a YouTube video of a bobbit worm. Found at the bottom of an aquarium after the fish started to suffer mysterious bites, the three foot long monstrosity had been living and feeding off the fish for a number of years. Upon its capture, the alien looking creature segmented off into three separate entities to tri-fold its aggressive nature, squirming and folding itself up against the sides of the tank as it brainlessly pondered its escape. With my imagination adrift in darkness my mind reeled back to this image, conjuring a mutant cousin of the bobbit worm (named for its scissor action mouth that cut into its prey, we have a jealous woman to thank for that, and a humorous scientist no doubt). This beyond skyscraper tall beast, with a multitude of layered stomachs each a different pitch of hell, could no doubt excrete me out into the black sandy depths along with the remains of my crewmates, and the anchors of galleons past. Its scissor jaw had just scraped me by, and our next meeting would involve a deadly fastening of a bear trap closing at lightning speed, impaling my legs as easy as a mutilating staple through a leaf. This hooking would be followed by a rapid descent to his ocean floor toilet, my breath abandoning me as my screams burst for the surface.

  Any second now…

  Whatever had tasted the back of my leg didn’t like it much as I felt no more frottage from the sea beast. Hungry, curious, or otherwise.

  Just a fish.

  I drifted in and out of consciousness a few times. I splashed the cool Atlantic on my face as if it were cologne, in effort to refresh myself and instil some vigilance. But soon enough I was impervious to its refreshing touch.

  Night continued its congealing, as it does on this side of the blinded Earth. All evidence of the sun had vanished. I was alone in darkness, that was the only fact I knew. I grew tired of floating there like a lost buoy, my eyelids dipped, and the terrifying dozing pull began its drain on me. Suspended above nothing I was lulled into the comfort of sleep, rocked like a heavy-lidded baby, soon my head dipped into the dark brine. I swallowed as I breathed in. My ears glugged; I coughed, spluttered, and cursed in surprise as I was dragged back from behind the veil of sleep to terrifying, hard choking consciousness, with a puppy yelp. From the expanse of my own dreamland, where I saw a brief oh-so-real image of Celeste, to being plopped straight back into the darkness of the mid-Atlantic night, waking me up. Now my brain buzzed with electric synapses as I became super-aware of my surroundings. The shot of adrenalin did the trick. I was awake. But the sensory deprivation I was forced to endure meant I didn’t have any surroundings, only the pressure of the salt water of which I no longer felt upon my body. I floated not in water, but nothing; 5/6ths limbo at most. I didn’t even feel the pressing wet anymore. I felt numb and dislocated from my body, as if my mind had been removed, and put away into storage. I was in third space. Not in body, not in mind, but somewhere in between. I scrunched my eyelids tightly and opened them, trying to adjust to the night, but it was useless, the moon wouldn’t play with me anymore. I was cast amongst the sinister stygian plunge of night, discarded by the cosmos; neither dead nor alive. I could make out a vague billowing in the sky above, as the moonlight tried to press through the clouds, and the faint rise and fall of the ocean before me. But as for the horizon, it was like two pieces of black fabric held beside each. There was no join, no seam to differentiate the distances. I was lost in an endless black curve.

  I pressed the balls of my hands into my sockets, pushing tight against my eyes, the pressure a slight relief, a weird pleasure. Pulling them away, I blinked, and revelled in the phosphenes that glittered midnight blue against my lonesome vision.

  Time lost meaning, lost speed. I was losing it, whatever it was. Had I had it to begin with? Had my entire life been a figment of my imagination? What if this was all there was? A black nothing from horizon to horizon.

  My mind, devoid of stimulation, started to form its own shapes. The Atlantic shimmered with a bright reddish purple, mimicking the glimmer from some alien sunset. Green dragons soared overhead. Shapeless, though mesmerising, they ploughed into each other, exchanging tones and direction, their colours mixing as clashing palettes. Severed wings carried on, beating as they left their owners bodies. Squirming tails snaked down from the sky, fracturing as they fell into multicoloured stardust that fizzed to nothing. The kaleidoscopic hallucination resembled a deleted scene from Fantasia, having me to wonder whether the creators had suffered similar circumstances as me to conjure such delusions.

  As beautiful as it was, I had the creeping feeling that my mind was shutting down and giving up. I was losing my mind and watching it go. The beautiful spectacle before me was a distraction to ease me into coping with my inevitable death. My mind was cushioning me with something I’d never expected to stop me feeling so vulnerable. Sweet brain, how you’ve cared for me all these years, keeping me from trouble, and providing me with endorphins and my future fantasies, all because you can’t cope with death and figure out a solution to this conundrum. Even in the face of death you’re making it all much better.

  Ohhmmmmmmm…

  I wondered if this calm approach by the human mind was the same for everyone. I expected a white light next, piercing through the lonely black like a spire of hope.

  I slapped my cheek hard and sudden enough to sting and bring my own stars to my eyes.

  Not yet, Death. Fuck you, not today, thank you kindly. I’m still with it.

  The dragons fractured like time lapse clouds burnt away by the dawning sun, the bright oil shimmers on the water dissipated. The water calmed black. The liquid graveyard vibrated in its usual sways, and again, I was alone.

  I scrunched my eyelids tightly and pressed the balls of my hands into the sockets. When I took them away and blinked out the stars, I saw the boat, clear as day, despite the dark. It was maybe a mile away, and motionless. Waiting for me.

  I started to swim. I didn’t even pull my goggles down. I did maybe a hundred strokes before I raised my head. I looked up and focused on the green and red painted boat. It was still there, clearer. But not much closer.

  I dipped under and ploughed on again. One hundred strokes again, blind through the dark. A suicide missile.

  I looked up, and the boat was in the same position. It must be drifting away from me. I could see it clearer now. It was a canal boat, painted green, the window frames painted red. What kind of idiot takes a canal boat on the open ocean?

  A beautiful idiot, that’s who.

  I swam towards the familiar boat. One hundred and twenty strokes this time. I looked up and see my father waving from the back of the boat. My mother pops up from the hatch and starts to wave me over. My brothers are at the windows inside, waving insanely. My family had come to save me.

  I take a few lacklustre strokes towards the boat and notice it gets farther away the closer I get to it.

  I dipped beneath the surface and snort thick plumes of Atlantic into my nasal cavity. It jars me. I lift my head and cough out the shocking saline foulness.

  The boat is gone. I remember it, though. My family holidayed on it when I was thirteen. It was a figment, but real to me. I’m back in the black, alone, and thoroughly awake and devoid of dreams. I’ve wasted precious energy. I cry out a plume of frustrated swear words into the cold night air, expecting them to echo back at me from the thick treacle black that pushed against me. I became accustomed to it, until my ears crackled with the emptiness of silence. Darkness stroked my face, a mysterious, illicit unrequited love reaching from beyond, touching me when I didn’t want to be touched. I jerked, flailed, shrieked, and shivered at nothing. It was a drip of water, an itch, or simply my imagination dealing possibilities and playing tricks.

  All the time I was thinking teeth, tongues, and tentac
les. A mass grab, a frenzy, a bite, and a swallow. I wanted my mind to lie to me, tell me everything was okay and this endless black was simply a dreamscape that had caught me in its webbing. I was losing sense of time, that’s why we have clocks and watches. It’s nice to be anchored to a point in the world that we can think back and relate to. I had no fixed point on which to base my observations. I was suffering from temporal dislocation.

  The sea sloshed back at my tiring anxiety, this sound the only evidence that anything else existed beyond my fraught mind, a soundtrack of my doom.

  Pounding, pounding, pounding me. Already it was breaking me down an atom at a time, as well as mocking my fragile mind. My decomposition had already begun without my passing. I was rotting. Each licking wave took a part of me away. I’d seen it happen. I knew the risks. First, by osmosis, the body starts to take on salt water, gathering beneath the skin in the cavity between the epidermis and muscle, bloating the body in a process known as third space fluids. Fingernails start to drop off next. Even now, I could feel it happen, my skin becoming looser as I gave myself unto the ocean.

  I’d feed a million tiny mouths.