Stout of Heart, Bereft of Mind

By Ben Leib

The shadow of the helicopter was visible beneath us, a blurry oval tipped forward and moving over the surface of the New Orleans swamps and waterways. I wasn’t faring well. It had been too long since I slept, and I’d been experiencing the slow passing of time as an undeserved cruelty. Or maybe it was deserved.

I’d signed up for a five week rotation. It wasn’t my first, and I’d been working aboard the Ferdinand for the better part of a year – five weeks on, five weeks off. But the survey was coming to an end, they’d prematurely cancelled our replacements, and the five weeks began to grow. It got longer. First it turned into thirty-nine days. Then the six week mark passed, and then the seventh. We’d been strung along with promises of a return to land that were never fulfilled, and I spent those last three weeks in steady decline.

It was the third of February when the survey came to an end. This happened abruptly. I’d finished my night shift and was bed just after noon. And then I proceeded to lay there, rolling from one side of the bunk to the other, fantasizing about how wonderful it could feel to sleep. There was a viciousness to my insomnia – a voice of paranoia whispering that I was indisputably an asshole, and that the shore-side population had finally figured it out. I knew I’d return to find the world had turned on me and I believed that decision justified.

Then someone pounded on my door. I nearly fell out of bed. “Yeah.”

Drew appeared backlit in my cabin doorway. “They done shooting. We have to retrieve the gear.” The survey was over. My job was nearly done. But I still had work to do and it would take me all day to do it, but that was all right, because what sleep was I getting anyway?

—

Twelve more hours passed. Drew, Dori, Amy, Rufino and I spent them coiling, spooling, and labeling cables for shipping. We wrapped laptops in metric yards of cling film so that they might stand up to the elements when left in a wooden crate aboard the deck of a supply ship. We drafted our biweekly environmental impact report, and then the end of project report. We redrafted them, and then we submitted everything to the desk jockeys in Houston.

More than twelve hours passed.

We were informed that the party chief had rescheduled the helicopter, and we’d should expect to depart at eight AM. Great news, objectively, but I began wondering if I’d ever sleep again. I took a break from composing and proofreading reports in order to pack my bags, and to launder my work gear.

“They’re going to let you leave,” Alessandra asked.

“And you said that you’d never get off this ship,” Patrick reminded me.

He was joking, but there’d been a point when I imagined dying out there. And eight weeks wasn’t so long, either. Two months without seeing land, without the love of friends and family. But the possibility of that two months stretching on forever hadn’t seemed so remote.

—

The day the internet went out had been bad.

“We’ve been troubleshooting all day,” Drew said. “It’s not the satellite. It’s not the router…”

“Well, isn’t that fucking convenient.” It was an expression of paranoia. We’d been getting jerked around by shore-side vessel managers and suddenly our only means of communication had been taken from us. I indulged fantasies of a week’s worth of radio silence while those fuckers toyed with my fate. They’d reestablish lines only to inform us that the survey was delayed through the Summer. Then – click – they’d cut the wires again. Maybe the fall. Maybe they wouldn’t let me off the boat for a year.

“What if there’s a fucking apocalypse?” I imagined risen corpses eating the flesh of my captors. “What the fuck would we do then?” I sat in the mess hall drinking coffee with four other guys from the instrument room.

Ike laughed. “At least we’d survive.”

“Would we? Would we fucking survive? We’d keep working this survey, mowing the fucking lawn out here, back and forth, over and over, waiting to hear from the Houston office that we’re all clear to move on. Without word from Houston we’d never leave.”

The guys indulged me with their nervous laughter, but they also eyed me. I told myself to reign it in. That was the beginning of week six.

When Drew approached me the following day to inform me that there’d just been an issue with a power supply, and the whole time the problem had been hiding in plain sight, and the satellite was working again, I still felt my paranoia just.

—

Rufino had it worse. The guy’d already spent four months on the vessel before they began pushing back the departure date. The administrators were less considerate to the Filipino employees, and it was taken for granted that they possessed something close to super human capabilities – as if they could easily put up with things that crewmembers of other nationalities wouldn’t consider attempting.

“Those guys will stay out here until their visas expire if they’re given the opportunity,” The party chief had told me, echoing the general opinion of the vessel managers who ensured Rufino would see such a fate.

When I asked how he was doing, Rufino responded, “My mind is sand.”

In the time since Rufino had boarded the ship, Typhoon Haiyan hit and Rufino’s Tacloban home had been rendered splinters. His wife survived unharmed and was living with her parents. Their neighbors were all homeless. Then the Bohol Earthquake struck, taking innumerable lives including that of Rufino’s closest friend. That was enough tragedy for one man to endure. It’d all happened back in October. I’d been back home since then, for the month of November.

Then in January, just in order to keep the man on his toes, fate served Rufino up another helping of misfortune. His next door neighbors, devastated by the storm, found themselves facing what they may have experienced as insurmountable destitution. The patriarch murdered his wife, two children, and then took his own life. These were Rufino’s friends.

If I’d been a shade more selfish, I would have resented Rufino’s travails, for his strength served to highlight my weak-mindedness. He suffered more than I did. “I cry at night when I’m alone,” Rufino told me. I tried to keep that in mind.

—

On Christmas, the galley staff put in overtime and cooked a huge spread for dinner and then again for lunch. A couple of the navigators had organized a raffle and BINGO, and whispers of a delayed crew change had yet to begin.

It wasn’t the first Christmas I’d spent offshore, and the same protocols played out on every ship. Folks walked around the vessel, shaking each other’s hands and wishing each other a happy holiday. It was a performance of the most minimal of acknowledgments that something might have been missed. It was an expression of solidarity, if not exactly celebration. The meal was something to look forward to, and then everyone trudged on, that much more determined to get back to their lives and their families.

I’d spent Easters, Forth of Julys, Thanksgivings, Halloweens… The Christian holidays were the ones that everyone seemed to acknowledge. The uniquely American holidays were totally unknown to the majority of an international crew, and I kept my mouth shut about my own Jewish traditions. Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and Taoists were also noticeably silent, though they were represented among the Ferdinand’s sixty-three crewmembers.

—

New Year’s offshore was different, and surprisingly more traumatic. People managed to be happy on Christmas – happy because it was Christmas. But spending New Year’s on the boat felt like terrible tidings of the three-hundred and sixty-five days to come. Delays had been announced and we were reminded it was our choices that had led us to such a predicament – we couldn’t blame anybody else for where we were.

That evening, the galley staff set out hats and noise makers in the mess hall. As midnight approached, a handful of crewmembers on shift collected this ephemera and migrated to the wheelhouse. It was dark but for the navigation systems – a few lights and monitors. A red glow lent ambience, and I was able to see that twelve of us had congregated there.

I was the only one who counted down to midnight. I screamed the number ten and everyone stared at me. By the time I got to one, it was just a determined whisper, and then I blew my cardboard horn. A few of the other guys blew their horns, too.

I held my arms out and walked toward Amy. She stiffened her arms at her side – a defensive position akin to playing dead – and she averted her face as I approached. “I don’t know what you want.”

“Give me a hug.”

“Okay.”

“Happy New Year’s.” I hugged Amy because she was the human being on the ship with whom I shared my job duties, and because she was my best friend out there. But I also hugged her because she was the only woman out of the dozen of us in the wheelhouse. I felt self-conscious about that fact, and decided that I needed to hug every other crewmember up there lest I be misinterpreted as a creep. And so began a slow round robin of awkward embraces.

“Happy New Year’s,” everyone said.

“Happy New Year’s,” as if hugging were part of some ancient maritime rite.

Then, prompted by a mutual understanding that the holiday had ended, we all walked out of the wheelhouse one by one, and we returned to work.

—

My five week rotation was coming to a close when I was informed that I wouldn’t be leaving. A delay of only four days, I was told. The passionate, trusting, hoping side of my brain wanted to believe. But the rational side hinted at something else, and I was forced to acknowledge that four days might be put off indefinitely. Ninety-six hours might grow into some monstrous number of hours that would have the power to drive me irreversibly insane.

“I just found out I’m not going to be back on Monday,” I messaged Corinne.

“What? Why?”

“The survey’s delayed, but they cancelled my replacements.”

“How long is this going to last?”

“They tell me four days. It could be longer.”

“How much longer?”

I couldn’t answer.

—

Corinne messaged me on the day I would have arrived back in California. “I told you that I could wait five weeks, and I have. But now you’re asking me to wait indefinitely. This wasn’t in the bargain.”

I’d made a lot of mistakes in the short time I’d known her. I’d anticipated the five week drain on honeymoon passion, and I’d warned her of the difficulties. Five weeks is a long time, I said, and I’ll only have to go away again. I distanced myself in preparation for a loss that I was used to by that point, and maybe in the process I’d come across as cold and unavailable. I was aware of those mistakes even as I was making them. It was a futile strategy for I found myself loving Corinne regardless.

But I’d also begun to realize other mistakes, ones I continued to make – the diction I chose when discussing the relative merits of meditation and psychiatric therapy, the abrupt way in which I’d broken the news of my delayed return, the eagerness with which I had discussed plans for some hypothetical dinner in San Francisco/day at the museum/trip to Seattle. Each word of communication became a mistake that I could dwell on and dissect, and in each case I came to the conclusion that I was a monster.

“I can sense that you’re losing interest here,” I replied, “and it makes me want to scramble. I want to remind you what a great guy I am, to assure you I’m worth the wait. But there’s the other side of my brain telling me that’d be crazy. I trust that voice because I am a little crazy right now. So what I’m going to say instead is that I recognize how difficult this is. I want to assure you that if you get tired of it, you can tell me. I won’t be happy, but I’ll understand.”

“No, I’m not ready for that yet. Let’s wait and see. We’ll meet when you get home. We’ll see how we feel then.” Corinne was trying to be sweet, trying to be diplomatic, but she was putting me in a limbo that would wear me down. She would grow cold, distant. My rational brain would tell me I’d lost a good woman. But the brain responsible for my fantasy life would spin yarns, narratives lapsing deep into an unknown future and involving Corinne’s life and mine intertwined. The conflict between those brains agonized me, and I found myself wishing that Corinne would cut the umbilical. The way she kept me dangling felt cruel. If there was nothing to look forward to, nothing hanging in the balance, then my decline might not have been so precipitous. But Corinne did not let me down easy and I was savaged by the indecision.

—

I’d always considered my mental fortitude indelible, but such assumptions are conceived to be tested. I wouldn’t have been able to pinpoint the exact moment folks began conspiring. I first sensed it in the tone my friends were taking – they wrote with coldness, after long lapses between correspondences. They began using the same verbiage, the same turns of phrase, as if they’d spoken amongst themselves and internalized a tone of distance, of condescension. Maybe they didn’t realize, but their tells were clear to me.

I’d written an ill-advised email to an estranged friend that could have set the ball rolling. Perhaps I posted something unpleasant, advertising my cretinism and alerting everyone to the fact that I’d been horrible all along. Or it could have been some past transgression come to light, leading folks to dig up old skeletons – there were enough of them. I could imagine the snowballing of exhumation, as if my dark places were a burying ground. The tibia of one skeleton might lead to the jaw bone of another, a few teeth in turn revealing vertebrae, and in that awful way the truth of my self could be unfolding before the world.

Every woman I’d known hated me. I’d acted terribly. I thought of the words I’d spoken: at times unkind or dismissive, and at other times bereft of boundaries. I’d promised love more than once. Five years’ worth of mistakes. Then I regressed further, back into the drinking and fighting days. It brought physical agony to recall. I’d unnecessarily hurt men. I’d been a liar and a thief. I adopted a disingenuous air of tolerance, and in the next breath slandered everyone I knew. I bad mouthed my partner, complained of her tyranny. Some of those old acquaintances had chosen her in the separation – most of them, really. Maybe they’d decided to start kicking that corpse. Lord knows it was repulsive enough to command attention – even after five years of decrepitude.

What would it would be like to face my old friends – all the people who knew me and had deigned to love me? They’d gone and I would be alone forever, and that was nobody else’s fault. It had just been a matter of time. I’d known all along, and the rest of the world was bound to find out.

—

Having worked through the night and spent the daylight hours wrapping up the project, with those first footsteps on land impending, I would be able to sleep finally. The insomnia would pass as the conditions for unrest had been lifted. That was the conclusion I’d come to after having been awake for thirty six hours, after too many consecutive restless nights grinding my teeth and lamenting my fate.

I mounted the bunk, lay on two pillows that I’d abused into slabs of cardboard, and I let the fear in. It wasn’t unlike my drinking days, except that back then the stupidity, the meanness, the blackouts all served to rationalize my fear. I would wake up from those mornings beset, awaiting the repercussions due me. Sometimes I couldn’t get out of bed without a drink. But that feeling had left me. The terror was gone.

I’d been out there too long – an eight week devolution – and now I was being told to face the world and I was trying to muster the courage to do such a thing. But I’d come to understand what awaited me. Maybe conditions will prevent the helicopter from landing, I assured myself, because just one more day, one good sleep, and I’d be okay.