I fold my hands and sit up a little in the cot. I just look at him like, What?
“We’ll be home in a month,” he says. He comes a bit closer and looks down at my head from above, I guess at the crack. Inspection time. On his way out he catches scent of the piss and shit bucket, and looks at the fag and cocks his chin at it, and goes out with his head down. His chin is gutty and flubbed like a fish that way. I wonder who would ever want to fuck such a man.
Things get slow down here.
There was a little Hindu man sitting cross-legged in the market in Calcutta waving a sword around his head. Johnson elbowed me at the sight of him, so we stopped and watched him put the blade down his throat, all the way till the handle was just sitting on his teeth. Some men came and the little man ran off, his head still thrown back, moving nimbly like a little lizard.
I asked Johnson how he could’ve survived such impalement.
“It’s all empty in there, Nicky,” he told me, drumming his chest. “Like a tunnel.” Then he knocked on my head. “You may be just clear of junk up here instead,” he said.
What I have been thinking, captain, is what is exempt from import tax in one country is what I’d like to stick through the crack in my skull to start to fill it: hay, oranges, lemons, pineapples, cocoa nuts, grapes, green fruit, and vegetables of every variety, and linseed oil cake. Horses, pigs, poultry, dogs, and living animals of every description, except cattle and sheep. Corks, bark, firewood, logwood, and dyewoods. Copper or yellow metal, rod bolts or sheathing, and copper and yellow metal nails. Felt for sheathing, oakum and junk, pitch, tar, and resin. Sail canvas, boats, and boat oars.
I fill my head with ships’ blocks, binnacle lamps, signal lamps, compasses, shackles, sheaves, deadeyes, rings and thimbles, dead lights, anchors, and chain cables of every description, and galvanized iron wire rope. Lime juice and ice. Printed books, music, and newspapers, maps, charts, globes, and uncut cardboard, millboard, and pasteboard. Ink, printing presses, printing type, and other printing materials. Passengers’ baggage or cabin furniture arriving in the colony at any time within three months before or after the owner thereof. Tablets, memorial windows, harmoniums, organs, bells, and clocks specially imported for churches or chapels. Hides and skins of every description, raw and unmanufactured. Veneers of all sorts. Rattans, split or unsplit.
Carriage shafts, spokes, naves, and felloes. School slates and slate pencils, slates for roofing, and slates and stone for flagging. Marble, granite, slate, or stone in rough block.
Soda ash, caustic soda, and silicate of soda. Cotton waste, woollen waste, candle cotton, wool, flax, hemp, tow, and jute, unmanufactured. Specimens of natural history, mineralogy, or botany. Gold dust, gold bars, bullion, and coin. Coir bristles and hair unmanufactured. Broom heads and stocks, partly manufactured for brushmaking purposes. Jars of glass or of earthenware, specially imported for jam. Rod bar hoop sheet plate and pig iron and piglead share moulds and mould boards. Epsom salts, citric acid, sulphuric acid, muriatic acid, carbolic acid. Hair cloth for hopkilns. Wines and spirits.
Captain.
What’s true?
We stayed a night in Mamaroneck, and though I’d have liked to get out and have a run at a grog shop, Johnson said we had to get up early to ride into the city, and laid out for me a set of his old clothes across the back of a chair: heavy brown trousers, a clean shirt, vest and woolen frock coat.
“New Haven is good for two things,” said Johnson, undressing for bed. “Sam Colts and cotton gin.” I watched him from where I stood, warming myself by the fire. His arms were thin and finely wrought. Hands red and afog in what I could only think what must be beauty. “I’m done,” he said, getting into bed. “New York is full of rich people, money, and wine. You just have to learn how to not take too much or you’ll get shut down.”
I stood there with my hands in my pockets. I was thinking he was a ride somewhere and another few meals until I got there.
“Who’s the girl?” I asked him.
“An old maid,” was his answer.
I stood there some more and watched him rub his eyes in a cracked mirror on the bedside table. “What you want me here for?”
“You got a gun?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“And you haven’t shot me yet,” he said.
“No.”
He threw a blanket at the rug by the fire and rolled over.
In the morning we found that Johnson’s trousers were too long on me and he had the girl hem them while I sat in my long johns by the fire and he got the horse ready.
North Sea, south of Long Fourties
There is a storm in the night and the boat rocks. Mates clamber up and down the hall and across the deck, hollering over the wind and rain. Raise the sails, furl the sails, repair the rigging, I remember all that. I stand on the cot to look out the window, wipe my face, watch the lightning flash through the white tower of flags, whipping crazy, the bow flying high, chair scraping along the floor behind me, the black seas all around. The ship tilts and rain spills in through the window onto the cot. I get up and drag the cot up against the door. This kind of dizzy makes sense when I walk. The piss and shit bucket I wedge in the corner. I’d like a smoke. I tip the cot to get the water off and lay back down. This is like high seas. The best part. I close my eyes, let the room spin.
“If you can’t sleep, think of things you like to eat, things you see walking down a road, girls’ names. Say them in your head, again and again, until you’re done.”
“I’m never done, Johnson,” I tell him. “It’s what I always need, one more.”
“Johnson, Johnson, Johnson, Johnson…”
THE END
About the Author
Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from Boston. She was awarded the Plimpton Discovery Prize for her stories in The Paris Review, and granted a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Rivka Galchen chose McGlue for the first annual Fence Modern Prize in Prose. Moshfegh is currently a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University.
About the Guest Editor:
Fence Books is the offspring of Fence, a biannual literary journal published continuously since 1998. Fence Books has been publishing mostly poetry since 2001. Over the years, many of the most adored and adorable poets have won some of our prestigious book prizes, which are the Fence Modern Poets Series, the Motherwell Prize (now the Ottoline), the National Poetry Series (Fence participates), and the new Fence Modern Prize in Prose (McGlue is its first winner; the second will be announced by December 25, 2014). Notable authors of poetry and prose include Ariana Reines, Douglas Kearney, Aaron Kunin, Harmony Holiday, Claudia Rankine, Catherine Wagner, Joyelle McSweeney, and Clark Coolidge.
About the Publisher:
Electric Literature is an independent publisher working to ensure that literature remains a vibrant presence in popular culture. Electric Literature’s weekly fiction magazine,