Supper is called, but Serge skips it. Lying on his berth, sweating, he becomes aware of his own body in a way in which he hasn’t been since adolescence. His limbs are heavy, gangly; they don’t seem like part of him-at least not parts that fall beneath his mind’s control, but ones jolted and twitched instead by some manipulating hand located elsewhere. The engine noise sounds in his chest. It seems to carry conversations from other parts of the vesseclass="underline" the deck, perhaps, or possibly the dining room, or maybe even those of its past passengers, still humming through its metal girders, resonating in the enclosed air of its corridors and cabins, shafts and vents. Their cadences rise and fall with the ship’s motion, with such synchronicity that it seems to Serge that he’s rising and falling not so much above the ocean per se as on and into them: the cadences themselves, their peaks and troughs…
When he falls properly asleep, he dreams of insects moving around a chessboard that may or may not be the sea. At times it seems more like a gridded carpet than a chessboard. The insects stagger about ponderously, stupidly, reacting with aggression towards other insects when these cross their paths: rearing up, waving their tentacles threateningly as antennae quiver and contract, and so on. Despite the unintelligent, blind nature of the creatures’ movement, there’s a will at work behind them, calculating and announcing moves, dictating their trajectories across the board. The presence of this will gives the whole scene an air of ritual. Above the board a voice intones, with a rhythm as steady as a galley drummer’s beat, “K4, K4, K4…” After a while the woven mesh of sea turns into desert: an enormous stretch of it, all parched and cracked, across which figures stumble-multitudes of them, whole armies, linked up hand-in-hand, wave after wave, heading towards a demarcated compound. Falkiner’s inside the compound, fiddling with an urn, his station-marked geometries forming the supporting struts and girders of some kind of sandbox…
Serge wakes up briefly. His berth’s drenched in sweat. Looking around the cabin, he sees nothing speciaclass="underline" just a cupboard and a chair, his untouched trunk. The single porthole gives onto a night that’s lit up by a full, bright moon. The sky’s a kind of silvery-black-an odd combination that, again, gives him the sense of having pitched up in a photographic negative. Turning away from the reversed image, he falls straight back into a lucid dream, once more of insects-only this time, all the insects have combined into a single, giant one from whose perspective, and from within whose body, he surveys this new dream’s landscape. In effect, he is the insect. His gangly, mutinous limbs have grown into long feelers that jab and scrape at the air. What’s more, the air presents back to these feelers surfaces with which contact is to be made, ones that solicit contact: plates, sockets, holes. As parts of him alight on and plug into these, space itself starts to jolt and crackle into action, and Serge finds himself connected to everywhere, to all imaginable places. Signals hurtle through the sky, through time, like particles or flecks of matter, visible and solid. Each of his feelers has now found its corresponding touch-point, and the overall shape formed by this coupling, its architecture, has become apparent: it’s a giant, tentacular wireless set, an insect-radio mounted on a plinth or altar. Serge is the votary kneeling down before it, arms stretched out to touch it; he’s also the set itself-he’s both. Twitching and shifting in his sleep, he fiddles with himself, nudging his way through the dial-and picks up, through the background thrum and general clutter of the conversations taking place all over, particular voices coming from some station that’s located in a cabin close at hand: one neighbouring his own, or two away, or possibly lying one deck above or below his and then one cabin along. They’re special voices, saying important things. There’s music coming from this nearby cabin-station too, but Serge can’t quite hear its melody: it, like the special voices’ words, is just beyond the range of hearing. He can tell, though, from the rhythm, the solemnity and grandeur of both words and music, that they form part of a ceremony of such splendour and magnificence that, to it, the ritualised game of chess he witnessed earlier bore the same relation as a canapé does to a banquet, a prelude to a symphony or a quick sketch to a fully executed masterpiece in oiclass="underline" the ceremony is the climax of the process he’s embarked upon, the main event.
“That’s the place to be,” he says aloud-and, in doing so, wakes himself up. It’s morning. The engine noise is still going. The ship’s rising and falling as before. He feels slightly better; climbing from his berth, he digs a dressing gown out of his trunk and, slipping it on, makes his way to the Borromeo’s baths. These are located near the ship’s stern: two rows of wooden shacks each of which opens straight onto the deck. There’s a queue to use them. Men read papers and nod at one another gruffly as they wait. Women queue on the far side. A young, honeymooning couple wave to one another from their segregated spots; the lady who was complaining earlier looks out to sea indignantly, clasping her towelling robe tightly around her shoulders. Crewmen change the water between bathers, sloshing from buckets as they swing these across the deck. The bath itself is filled with hot sea-water, cooked in the ship’s bowels and piped in through a tap; what the staff are replacing is the bowl of fresh water that rests above this on a shelf. Both have traces of engine oil in them. Stretched out in the tub when it’s his turn, Serge watches the petroleum and coal-tar swirl and coalesce across the water’s surface; then he shifts his gaze down to his ankle, which is suppurating. Flesh-eating, Laura told him: lying on his back quite still, ignoring the impatient tapping on the door, he pictures himself as a dead man in a sarcophagus, swathed in spells and imprecations, heart replaced with secret writing and censorious seals. The soap has a logo embossed on its surface; it has tar on it as well. Serge feels more dirty after he’s washed than before, as though his labours, like those of a dung-beetle, had soiled rather than purified him.
Breakfast consists of blocks of bacon, fried bread, black pudding and mushrooms. They all look the same: dark lumps of matter. They taste the same as well, all giving off the flavour that, in vapour form, pervades the whole ship: a compound of decayed funguses, hot engine oil and onions. The indignant lady’s at it again, complaining to the stewards that she hasn’t been allotted the right table. The stewards try to relocate her, concocting a story about mixed-up or badly copied seating manifests, which they attempt to sell, with profuse apologies, to the family at the table the complainer covets. These people grudgingly move, although not to the complainer’s table, which is too small to accommodate them: they’re re-seated at a third one, which necessitates a new eviction, a new relocation. Pushing his plate away half-eaten, Serge leaves the dining room and skirts a game of deck quoits being played outside. Pausing for a while, he stares at the patterned markings and the poles rising above them; then, feeling fever taking hold of him once more, heads back to his cabin.
Lying on his berth, he sweats. The sweat, mixing with the tar-deposit left on his skin from his bath, turns black. That’s what he thinks is happening, at least: it’s possible that the sweat came out of him black in the first place. Mela chole: he hears, amidst the engine’s rumble and the room’s higher-pitched rattling, Dr. Filip’s thin, electric voice talking about black meat. He hears a lot of things: chants of the Versoie Day School children as they reel off their pronunciation exercises, footsteps marching along country roads, the whirr and clack of film projectors or motorised curtains. It seems that these are welling upwards, from the bottom of the sea-and that the sea itself is black, oily and dense. Closing his eyes, he pictures it as shellac, and the Borromeo’s prow as a gramophone needle, bobbing as it rides the contours of a disc. After a while, the image grows so strong in his mind that he becomes convinced that there’s a Berliner just outside his cabin: one deposited by someone, for some reason, in the corridor beside his door. He can clearly hear it playing, repeating variations of the same phrase: