Chapter Five: Bering Dreams

The sodium vapor lights only reach into the night, 20 or 30 yards beyond the stern and your not sure if that's a good thing or not. On one hand you can't really see what's out there, and on the other, your imagination fills in the blanks. Not that your imagination has to work very hard. You thought about this for a long time and you figured it would be hard but in the end your imagination pales before the reality. You imagine it may feel like this if you were swallowed by a dragon. Or a whale. Is this how Jonah felt? But whales are graceful, floating weightless under the surface. Up here there is no grace to be found and gravity has gone insane. All of your senses scream at you, telling you, you should not be here. You don't belong. Youre a trespasser. But there is no place else to go.

And the sea stretches out beyond the Stern until it vanishes into darkness. Smoking and boiling as if alive like some obsidian lava or inky bile. It rises up, up and up and you arch your neck but still can't see the top beyond the sodium's and then it's falling and falling and now there is nothing past the stern for a few moments except emptiness that hangs like an eternity until it all comes crashing back up and up and up again.

The men around you are hunched, faces buried under layers and hoods, each living separate bad dreams within a collective nightmare. Eyes squinting inside pasty cracked skin rimmed with dried salt spray. Beards growing whiter and whiter as ice builds, sprouting from chin and nostril as if each minute they are growing older and older, growing impossibly old, the sea stealing more years of their lives than ever they will live until they become some strange waddling creatures that defy age altogether. As if time has no meaning here, each moment an eternity and it's all some strange foggy dream that may have never happened or never ceases happening. You fear this will not end and you have been banished to some remote corner of hell where the fires have all burned out. And carrying all your sins and failures and mistakes on your back for all these years you still can't understand how you deserved this fate. How did things go so wrong that you ended up here. The only blessing being that amidst all this water there are no reflections and no mirrors because if there were, then the man staring back would be a stranger to you. Would be someone you never want to see, eyes burning into you, accusing, angry. Asking why did you bring me here?

And a wave crashes down from over the shelter deck but seeming to come from everyplace at once. For a moment you are inside it and then it's gone, leaving you on your hands and knees like a three legged dog, gasping for air and dripping and then the ship roles and your sliding, sliding on your back and the sea is reaching for you, into your pant-legs and sleeves and your tightly buttoned collar and pulling you towards the rail and someplace far away there are men yelling and reaching for you and you slip by them all and slam into the rail wall and then one of them is there to pull you to your feet and you stagger away as the ice water runs like fire down your spine and your eyes burn from salt. You stagger away for something, anything to hold onto for a few seconds. To catch your breath.