Where had the fellow appeared from? How long had he been swimming? It was growing too dark to see clearly. I looked about for a line that I could cast to him, but he was still too far away for that. Perhaps, I thought, he would make it to the ladder on his own. But he was swimming awkwardly now, as if on the verge of exhaustion, as if ready to go under.
And then suddenly with a lurch the ship began to move, slowly at first and then with increasing speed. I watched the swimming man stop mid-stroke, staring after us, and then he sank below the waves and was gone.
I rushed about the ship, crying out until I found the captain again, standing just where he had stood before, on the night I had first met him, holding the same lantern.
“Ah, Kuylers,” he said. “Relishing the journey so far?”
I explained, shielding my eyes from the glare of the lantern, what I had seen, the man swimming, making doggedly for us, then stopping and sinking beneath the waves.
“A shame,” said the captain.
“But we must go back,” I said.
The captain shook his head. “If he is to catch up with us, he’ll catch up with us tomorrow. If not, it’s not meant to be.”
“He won’t be alive tomorrow,” I said.
“He’ll travel all the faster then,” said the captain. “Besides, who’s to go, Kuylers? We have a full ship: who is to go?”
I told him he was callous. There was room aboard, I said, plenty of it. What kind of men have I thrown my lot in with? I wondered aloud. He just laughed, turned away.
I spent my early evening wandering the deck, finding as I could crew members who, busy though they were with their various tasks, deigned to listen to me as they worked. It was a matter of a human life, I told them, we must go back. Most listened in silence. They paused just a moment as I concluded and then shook their heads and went on with their tasks. One asked me, in a soft, whispering voice, what the captain himself had had to say about it, and when I explained what the captain had said, the fellow nodded and declared the captain to be quite right.
“But what does he mean, ‘Who’s to go?’” I asked. “Surely we can take a man as far as the next port.”
The man shook his head. “The captain’s right,” he said, and would say no more.
Soon my hunger, forgotten in the excitement due the swimmer, returned and I made another circuit of the deck, inquiring of my shipmates when I might expect a meal. They ogled me as if I were mad, and refused to respond. As I backed away from them, I found them whispering among themselves, their heads inclined toward one another against the lesser dark of the night sky. There was something wrong, I started to feel, with my having posed this question, some breach of etiquette, as if I had crossed a boundary of taste without knowing. I was not a sailor; perhaps there was something I should know but did not. And yet, could they not make allowances for my ignorance and let me know both how I had mistepped and also what I must do to be fed?
I withdrew, then sat alone up near the prow, watching the waves. I stayed there staring out into the darkness, the breeze chill against my flesh, trying to ignore the way my stomach pounded like an unbattened shutter in the wind. It had been a mistake, I told myself, to leave the city as precipitously as I had, a mistake, too, to kill Kuylers. All of it a mistake. And yet here I was, I reminded myself. I must make the best of it.
In the end, after hours of waiting, my stomach convinced me. Surely it could not hurt, it told me, to speak with the captain about food. He at the very least had to acknowledge me. If I were in fact breaking etiquette, I had breached it already, and the captain, who knew something of my circumstances coming aboard, of my lack of experience at sea, might at least prove sympathetic.
The captain was to be found where I had seen him before, lantern still in his hand.
“Yes?” he said gruffly. “What is it now?”
It was only, I said, that I had perhaps somehow missed the bells that called the crew to meals. Surely my fault but, you see, I hadn’t had anything to eat since boarding the ship last night, and little, to be honest, to eat the day prior. If it wasn’t too much trouble, a few scraps, just something to line my stomach with, the smallest thing—
“What?” he asked, as if amazed. “You want to eat?”
Well, yes, I said, just a few scraps …
He swung the lantern toward me. “Are you really who you claim to be?” he asked. “Are you Alfons Kuylers?”
“What does my being Kuylers have to do with it?” I asked. But when he kept regarding me without responding, I saw no choice but to repeat my lie. Yes, I claimed, I was Alfons Kuylers, hadn’t I told him as much from the first?
With this, his brow relaxed slightly and he turned away, mumbling that perhaps there was still something in the hold, that I should help myself to anything I could find.
And indeed, after a good moment of scrabbling through the hold, I found, at the bottom of an overturned barrel, some old hardtack and, in a bottle rolling loose among the debris, a good measure of third-rate whiskey. It will be enough, I told myself, soaking the hardtack in whiskey so as to choke it down. It will keep me until morning, when I can find out more about regular meals and learn where to get water.
Yet in the morning I awoke alone again in my bunk, the ship no longer moving, the bunks around me neatly made as if never having been slept in. I made my own bunk in the same fashion, then made my way up abovedecks. I could see no anchor dropped and yet the ship remained as motionless as if it were encased in stone. The deck, too, as on the day before, was deserted, the deckhouse as well, and my investigations of the spaces belowdecks led to the same locked doors, the same absence of personnel. I pounded on these locked doors and demanded admittance, without response.
My throat, deprived of water for a day and a half now, was parched and dry. After much searching, I found in the corner of the hold, strewn with garbage, a few mouthfuls of brackish water that at first I gathered in my palm, and then, once it was nearly gone, I crouched to lap the rest up like a dog.
In the captain’s cabin, in a small lacquered chest, I found a short crowbar, alongside a loaded pistol. I took both. The crowbar I used on one of the locked doors, knocking first and, when there was no response, slowly prying the lock out of the frame. Behind it was the galley, but the room itself was empty, no foodstuffs or staples of any kind. I managed to undo the pipe under the sink and drank the fusty water that had gathered in its angle. But there was nothing to eat.
I went from locked door to locked door, bellowing, and then, when I received no response, forcing my way in with the crowbar. I had, I realized, crossed over some sort of line that I was not likely to be able to cross back over again. With the opening of each new door and the revelation of yet another room, I felt a little more unhinged myself, a little madder, the lack of food, too, acting oddly upon me so that I felt as though my skin were being eaten by insects. What were they playing at? I wanted to know, increasingly furious, Why would they hide from me? When I found them, I told myself, I would hold a pistol to the captain’s head and demand he tell me what was going on.
But what was I to do when, cracking open the last door, the door behind which the captain and crew by default had to be gathered, I found the room as impossibly empty as all the rest?
My memories of the next few hours are tenuous at best. I recall a kind of vague stumbling belowdecks, panic alternating with fury. I entered each room again to assure myself my shipmates were not there, then entered yet again. I held the pistol to my temple and tried to persuade myself to pull the trigger, but could not. With the crowbar, I broke what I could in the captain’s cabin and then remained there among the wreckage, listless. At some point I lost the gun, abandoned it somewhere belowdecks, and when I ran out of things to break, I let the crowbar trail from one hand and scrape along the floor until that too slipped from my fingers and was gone.