At the top of the staircase is a narrow corridor full of darkness, but Jón Karl knows he’s reached the upper deck and he knows he’s on the starboard side of the ship, so all he has to do is feel his way across to the port side, where there must be some door to the light.
And, sure enough…
Jón Karl hasn’t been feeling his way for long when he sees a dim light above a sturdy door with three hasps. As this doorway is on his right in the corridor, it opens out, towards the bow of the ship, which doesn’t seem particularly logical to Jón Karl as he is sure he is very far forward on the deck. The door should be on the left and open onto the deck; for instance, into the corridor where the pantry is to port and the laundry room to starboard. And this is the only door in the corridor that ends there, which continues neither up nor down, forward nor back.
‘Fucking ridiculous!’ Jón Karl says, clamping his bedding under his left arm while he undoes the hasps with his right. The glass on the light above the door is both scratched and dirty, and the bulb under it is yellowish and pale, but in spite of the weak light Jón Karl manages to read what is painted in white on the red door: HOLD.
‘Hold what? Hold it?’ murmurs Jón Karl, making a final effort that tears open the third hasp. Going by the streaks of rust, the squeaking and the stiffness of the hasps, this door hasn’t been opened for a long time, and when Jón Karl finally manages to pull the heavy door into the corridor he is faced with a darkened emptiness, full of foul-smelling cold, and just as he lets go of the door the ship pitches, smashing into a heavy wave.
Boom, boom, boom…
Jón Karl loses his balance, stubs his toe on the high threshold and falls forwards through the doorway in a kind of somersault. His left hand gropes and finds something hard and cold, while the bedding, towels and facecloths soar like ghosts through the dark and disappear into the damp depths.
‘Yeah, right,’ he mutters. Jón Karl is hanging by one hand to some sort of railing and rubbing against a cold iron wall, surrounded by a dark and a terrifying void. He twists round and gets a grip on the metal with his right hand, then feels around with his feet and finds a notch or sill to step on. After feeling around some more and adjusting both his hands and his feet, he realises that he’s standing on a vertical ladder that curves from the bottom of the doorway, down along the wall and deep into the ship’s hold – a vast space as long, broad and deep as the ship itself, a rectangular tank full of cold and dark.
Jón Karl climbs up the ladder, turns around and sits in the doorway with his feet on the top rung. He feel around his ears and finds one cigarette behind each, which means that only one was lost in those acrobatics.
‘Not bad,’ he says and lights the cigarette from behind his left ear. He blows out smoke, holds onto the doorframe with his left hand and silently stares into the empty hold. He can’t see them in the dark, but there are four hatches the size of football fields over the hold – he saw them from up on the bridge and if he didn’t know better he might think he was staring into genuine night, not enclosed darkness.
Jón Karl sits there for a while, smoking serenely and looking neutrally at this rectangular eternity, this bottomless void, which is of course neither eternal nor bottomless, but it seems like that from where he’s sitting, and while it seems so it is so – it’s as simple as that.
Deep under the darkness the engine counts its eternal beats and the ship rises and falls, rocks and rolls, on the expansive dance floor of the ocean, and the ship breathes, the ship moves and the ship generates long, drawn-out screeching and creaking, and in the empty hold the sounds turn to the voices of the condemned, who writhe about in perpetual torment, wail like the newly born, roar like distant monsters and produce soulless sobs that echo between the iron walls and turn into pathetic whimpers in the head of the man who sits stock still and listens to the threads of his own mental health snap like guitar strings being pulled apart by faceless fiends.
The dark is simply dark, which is a black hole and a lifeless abyss, but suddenly there is a flash of brightness that blinds Jón Karl for just a moment. It lights up the pale face of his daughter, who makes an inhuman noise and looks helplessly into her father’s eyes, then disappears in an instant, like a spark, into the leaden blackness inside his head.
‘I hate this fucking ship,’ he says, shooting his lit cigarette into the void. Then he stands up, steps over the threshold, closes the heavy door and slams the hasps into place so violently that rust rains into the corridor.
Jón Karl curses and walks back along the corridor, all the way to the ladder that leads down to the boiler room. But when he turns around to back down the ladder he finds himself staring into the gloom at the front end of the corridor, right by the bulkhead to starboard.
There’s an open doorway right above the stairwell. He hadn’t noticed it before because it’s pitch black inside. Jón Karl decides to walk through the doorway and feels his way in the dark until he finds a light switch on the right-hand wall.
He turns on the light and is faced with a little workroom with a table, chair and long shelves, with countless little plastic drawers full of small items and electrical bits. Jón Karl walks through the room and opens a door in the wall kitty-cornered from the other doorway, and this brings him back to the corridor on the upper deck. To his left is the laundry room and, at the end of the corridor to starboard, the stairs leading up to B-deck, where a light is blinking as if about to go out.
Jón Karl closes the door behind him and reads what’s painted on the door in white letters: ELECTRIC WORKSHOP. He fetches some more clean linen in the laundry room and makes his way up to D-deck and into his cabin, where he throws the bedding on the unmade bed and hangs the towels in the bathroom. The air in the cabin is stale and cloying; Jón Karl decides to open the window wide. To do this he has to loosen four big nuts and move an equal number of bolts out of the iron grip of the window, which opens into the cabin and lets in cool night air and cold raindrops, as well as the noise of the blowers.
Jón Karl stands, stooped over, on his bed, sticks his head out the window and lets the wind and rain refresh him. A faint light comes from somewhere and he can vaguely see the propeller and bottom of a big, orange plastic lifeboat that sits in white davits right in front of the window, on a forty-five-degree incline back along the ship, bow down and stern up.
‘Amazing,’ he says and sniffs rainwater up his nose, then he pulls his head in and steps down off the bed, turns off the cabin light and strolls up to the bridge.
Just before he turns the doorknob into the bridge, he hears a loud voice through the closed door.
‘Have you gone out of your mind?’
Jón Karl smiles crookedly and lays his ear against the door, but the voices inside are both low and unclear, as if the men have suddenly regained their tempers.
What’s going on in there?
Jón Karl is too curious to eavesdrop like this if he can’t hear what’s being said.
‘Evening,’ he says, slamming the door behind him. ‘What’s going on here?’
There are two men standing before him: Jónas and a middle-aged guy wearing a bathrobe.
The light is dim in the bridge but the air is so charged it almost illuminates the entire area.
The mate says nothing but the guy in the bathrobe looks searchingly at Jón Karl, who is both red and wet in the face, as if he has just come in from the storm – which, of course, he has, in a way.
‘Where have you been?’ asks the guy in the bathrobe, his voice low and frosty.
‘This is the captain,’ says Jónas, looking at Jón Karl with eyes that beg for cooperation, restraint and mercy. ‘I told him you—’