Long Way Down (25 page)

A loud burst of static answered me. Then I realized that there was a voice in there somewhere, but I couldn’t understand a word.

“SOS. Do you get that? I have no propulsion and the boat is taking on water.” I looked around again for any landmark that might help. Everything was black. The aura of the city did little to illuminate the dark shores where I was.

The water was up to my knees.

I dropped the radio and began searching for anything I could use to possibly plug the holes. I opened one locker and found a pair of life vests. I pulled one out and strapped it on. Jammed down in the bottom of the locker was a foul, torn section of towel. It stank. I tore off a section, bent down, and felt along the deck until I found a spout of water coming up through a jagged hole. I stuffed the bit of towel into it and felt the rush of water there come to a halt. It was working.

I moved down the deck and filled another hole, but as I searched for a third, I saw the scrap from the first hole floating by beneath the surface.

Damn. I needed something to hold the towels in place. I got up and searched through the other two lockers. One had a large clear-plastic box. I pulled it out. In with a roll of duct tape and another of
black electrician’s tape, screwdrivers, a wire brush, O-rings, a tube of silicone goop, and miscellaneous screws, bolts, and nuts was a plastic bag with six or eight wooden plugs inside. I tore the bag open and the cork-shaped plugs scattered across the cockpit. I grabbed two and sank down again, searching for a hole. The first plug was far too large. I tossed it over the side and tried the other. It was tight. I pushed it down as hard as I could and searched for another hole.

A random thought floated through my mind—a half case of wine would come in very handy right then. The corks would be the perfect size. And I could drink myself stupid.

Another plug felt too tight. I placed the heel of my shoe over it and stood up, pressing down until I felt it sink and hold. Another plug fit with less persuading. I was winning. How many holes were there? I didn’t know. Five? Six? Less? I couldn’t remember. I hadn’t been keeping a close count, I had been wrestling to save my life. I found another plug that looked almost right, felt along the floor until I found another underwater fountain, and jammed it in. The hole was too big. The plug bobbed out as soon as I took my hand away. The water was still rising.

I jammed the plug in again and did the trick with my foot, rising and pressing down hard. It seemed to work, but when I stood up I realized that the water was halfway up my thigh. I looked over the side of the boat. The rail was now less than a foot above the waterline. I wasn’t winning, I was merely delaying the inevitable. The last plug popped out again and bobbed up in front of me. The deeper we sank, the more pressure on the plugs. I screamed in frustration.

“Shit! Shit!” I did not want to die that way. I reflected that I did not know how I wanted to die. Presumably at home in my bed, surrounded by loved ones, but not for many years to come. I wanted to have plenty of time—decades—to think it over.

The lights of Manhattan were noticeably closer. I had a good idea where I was. Somewhere in the blackness ahead were the two
bridges connecting Queens to the Bronx. I had grown up there. It was difficult to judge how fast the current was pulling me to the west, but I knew that it would accelerate once I got past the first bridge. The East River started there, and I knew that it could rip through as fast as a grown man could jog. The river was narrower, but the sides were steeper and the water more dangerous. I needed to do something quickly.

I waded back to the controls and tried the radio again. Nothing, not even static. The rising water must have shorted something out. Then the navigation lights—the red and green on the bow and the white in the back—flickered out. The battery had been submerged for some time, but the water had just got through to it. The engines stopped. One moment their sound was the background to my nightmare, and the next it was silence that pressed in, as though a pillow had been pressed down over me, smothering my senses. I began to shiver.

My brain functions seemed to be slowing down. Concentration on my predicament, while still causing me great anxiety, also seemed to be a problem that I could deal with later—after I had rested a bit. I recognized it as the beginning of hypothermia and fought back.

I was on a boat. I had no power. No way of signaling for help. Drifting at a moderate pace in the general direction of a lighthouse. Was it manned? No one manned lighthouses anymore, did they? Everything was electronic. The light flashed at me again, and for a moment I lost my night vision. But it gave me a thought.

There must be some kind of signaling devices on board. Flares or a spotlight or a horn. Something. I went back to the lockers and began searching again. There was a big handheld spotlight—which had already been immersed too long. Nothing happened when I hit the switch. I found an air horn—a bit of plastic shaped like a trumpet on an aerosol container. I stuffed it into the pocket of my coat and kept looking.

A wave sloshed over the side. The boat was still six to eight inches over the water level, but it wasn’t going to be much longer.

I found a blaze orange container—vaguely cylindrical, eight inches around and more than a foot long with a fabric loop connected to one end. There was a seam around the midway point but no obvious button or other way to open it. I forced myself to take my time and think clearly. I grabbed the two ends and twisted. It opened. Inside were flares, an orange smoke canister, and some other items—flags, possibly. There wasn’t time to try any of them out. I closed the container, undid my belt, and ran it through the loop.

It was time to abandon ship. I climbed onto the raised area over the bow and reviewed the situation. The lighthouse was coming up on my right a quarter mile away—though it was almost impossible to judge distance accurately. Longer was okay, even twice that. The path that the boat was taking would pass the rocks around the little island by only fifty or sixty feet. I tried to judge the speed. One or two miles per hour. Definitely less than three. If I jumped in the water and swam, I would have seven or eight minutes to cover the fifty lateral feet to land on the near end of the island. How long was the island? I couldn’t tell, but I had some grace to my calculations. If I didn’t make the first landfall, there was still a very good chance of reaching some point on the island. Seven minutes was a long time to be in that cold water, but not deadly. I tightened the life vest, checked that the canister was secure, and jumped as far as I could to clear the boat.

After standing in the water for as long as I had been—it felt like hours—I blithely expected that I would have been immunized against the shock of total immersion. I wasn’t.

I gasped and swallowed water. Rule number one for avoiding death by drowning: Keep mouth shut.

I spit out water, got my bearings, and started swimming. Bogged down by the long overcoat, heavy shoes, and life vest, I was not moving quickly, but I was moving and I had time. In the water, the
pull of the tide was much more discernible. I hoped I had not misjudged the speed. I could be past the island completely before covering the lateral distance. I swam harder. I was tired, but if I arrived exhausted and spent, I would still be alive.

The first blow felt like a feeble punch in the middle of my back. It confused me more than anything. I had already taken another hard stroke toward shore before it occurred to me that I shouldn’t be getting punched in the back—feebly or no—in the middle of Long Island Sound. Then it happened again, only this time it hurt. It stung. Something sharp had just penetrated my back.

“What the hell?” I yelled, now suddenly terrified. I whirled around in the water, seeking my attacker, only to find a long arm coming down at me, the sharp steel of the fishing knife reflecting in a flash of the beam from the lighthouse. I got my arm up in time, catching the man’s forearm and pushing it away, receiving nothing more than a slice in the sleeve of my coat. I held tight and pulled him to me. It was Haley, but a Haley transformed. His handsome face was mangled and broken. One eye was sliced open, the cut running from his hairline to his jaw. His nose was half gone, and when he opened his mouth to scream at me, I saw that all of his front teeth were missing.

He threw his other, almost useless, arm over me, trying to pull me to him and down. I tried to kick myself away and missed, in the process losing my grip on his good arm. The knife swung up and tore my life vest open, narrowly missing my face. He swung again and the knife snagged on the jacket’s heavy nylon strap. Haley tugged at it and it tore through and flew from his hand, sinking immediately. I threw a punch that landed on the side of his head, hurting me as much as him.

There was no elegance, thought, or expertise to our fight. It was sloppy and brutal, and would have been humorously ineffectual if we both were not so close to final collapse. But it was deadly.

The life vest, punctured in three places, had become an encumbrance, weighing me down, and I felt myself going under, Haley clambering on top of me. I struck out wildly, in a panic, and managed to land at least one blow, and for a moment I was free. I rose up to the surface and grabbed a breath—possibly my last.

Haley wasn’t done. He punched hard between my legs, but the orange canister saved me, blocking the force of the blow. I thrashed backward, windmilling my arms through the water. He couldn’t keep up, though he slashed at the water with that one good arm, as though hacking me to pieces.

I risked a look behind me. The current was taking us faster than I had expected. We had passed the first set of rocks and I was almost level with the lighthouse itself and still ten yards to go. I pushed harder.

Behind me, I could hear Haley trying to keep up—to catch up—but the sounds of his efforts became faint. He didn’t have the strength. I didn’t know where mine came from.

Then I realized that the closer I got to the rocky shore, the less effect the tide had on me. The rocks were moving by much slower. I was going to make it.

Another few strokes and my hand brushed against an underwater rock just a foot or so below me. It was smooth and slick with algae. I pushed on and then lunged forward to grab at the boulders along the shore. I slipped off the first, but by then I was drifting so slowly that I had time to prepare for the next. I grabbed again and this time I held on. Slowly, I pulled myself up. The rocks there had no watermarks or slime. It was close to high tide. I was cold, exhausted, in danger of succumbing to exposure, and marooned on a rocky outcrop in the middle of the Sound, with no idea if anyone would be looking for me. But at the moment, no one was trying to kill me, and unless I rolled over and fell back in the water, I was in no danger of drowning. Things were looking up.

I
was awake and shivering. If I was shivering, I was still alive. I was very tired. If I could just sleep again—for another hour—then I’d be all right. Ready to start the day. So what was keeping me up? I was lying on a perfectly comfortable rock, still soaked to the skin, with a dull throbbing pain on one side of my head and a second in the middle of my back. I also thought I might have a cracked rib or two because it hurt when I breathed too deeply.

It was too early to get up. It was still very dark. I checked my watch. It was too dark to see it. Then I remembered. My watch was sitting on top of my dresser in my apartment. I wished that I was in my apartment. It would have been warmer. And drier.

Lights flashed by me. Searing white. Twirling blue and red. They came and went. Sometimes lights like that played across my ceiling, reflections from down on Broadway. Emergency vehicles. Ambulances heading to Roosevelt Hospital. Police cars or fire trucks.

I tried to roll over and almost fell off the rock. The water was a long way down. Three or more feet below me. It hadn’t been that way before. Tides. Of course. Why was I feeling so stupid? Hypothermia. Brain function was beginning to fail. All organs not
immediately involved in keeping the body warm were slowing down. I was dying. Slowly, it was true, but inevitably. I felt like HAL in the movie
2001
, trying to sing “Daisy.”

“Hey . . . Help me . . .” The dark and the sea gobbled up my voice. It felt like I was yelling into an infinite expanse of marshmallows. I could barely hear myself.

I pulled myself higher onto the rock, muscle spasms overtaking the shivers. My arms cramped and froze. I had to tell them, one at a time, to release and let me reach for the container of flares.

The lights had passed by and were out in the blackness to the west. Not close, but close enough to register a flare. They’d have blankets.

I reached for the canister. It was much lighter than it should have been. It took me only a split second to realize what it was, and what must have happened. Only the screw-on top was still attached to my belt. The bottom half, with the flares, orange smoke, little emergency flags, and everything else, was gone. Haley must have hit it, aiming for me, and broken the seal, releasing the container and leaving me with nothing more than a plastic cap. My lifesaving flares were only twenty feet or so away—in forty feet of water.

I screamed. I tried to force myself to my feet, tripped and fell back onto the rock. I screamed again and again until my throat was as ravaged as the rest of me. No one heard me. Stupidity and lethargy took me back.

—

I heard voices.
Some were weeping, some were angry. Occasionally one or another would scream wordlessly. I opened my eyes. It was as dark with my eyes open as closed. The few stars that had been out earlier were gone. I looked down over the edge of the rock. I still couldn’t see the water, but I could tell it was there, writhing through the rocks, seeking me. But I was safe from the water. And
I was no longer shivering. Or even cold. Or rather, I did not feel cold, because I still understood that I was very cold. Deathly cold.

The voices murmured constantly, then rising in volume, they called angrily to me. It was like a chorus of drunken monks, one minute chanting indistinguishable words, the next laughing and shouting.

Then I began to see the faces below me. Luminescent faces beneath the waves, staring up, mouths open, calling and crying. I closed my eyes and still saw them. It was a relief. I was only hallucinating. They weren’t real.

I ignored them and fell back onto my pillow of rock and into my cocoon of sleep.

—

The voices were back.
They were still calling, but softer now. Not angry. I opened my eyes and looked down. I could see water now. Gray water lapping at black rocks, with occasional flashes of dull green or grayish white as foam formed and broke apart.

My very dull brain told me that this was important information, but it still took an eternity for me to form the facts into an idea. I could see. Therefore I was presumably not dead. That was important. But the fact that I could see also meant that it was morning. I had survived the night.

The voices were maddening. They were on the cusp of being understandable. If I could just silence the damn water and the mild wind, I might be able to hear what they were saying. They were speaking and calling to each other again. Male voices. Authoritative. With strong Long Island accents.

An outboard engine roared nearby and a yellow-and-black speedboat rocketed by me, those red and blue lights flashing. I saw two policemen in bright yellow slickers on the deck, their eyes fixed on the waters ahead. They were no more than thirty feet away.

“Help me . . .” It was useless. My throat was shot. I had no strength. They wouldn’t have heard me if they were standing over me. I started to cry. I didn’t want to, but it was so sad. I was going to die because Haley missed hitting me in the balls and broke the frigging canister instead. I rolled onto my back and stared up at the gray cloud-covered sky.

Far to the east there was a faint pink light behind the clouds. There was no horizon. Gray met gray. Then the pink began to spread and deepen.
Red sky in the morning. Sailors take warning
. I must have read that somewhere. Or heard it. Maybe on NPR. I started to cry again. I was going to die on a rock in a snowstorm while yards away and just beyond salvation, people searched for me.

There was a second boat. The other voice. The policemen had been calling to each other. Something about the search. This boat was slowly coming up the far side of the island. They would never see me. But they were looking, searching the shore. If I could just stand.

I tried again, got to my knees and collapsed. The muscles did not answer. The brain was making very specific demands and the nervous system was delivering orders but the muscles had given up. I fell. I fell and something hard in my coat pocket jabbed into my hip.

My coat was still wrapped around me. A good woolen coat once upon a time. Still a good coat. Wool warms. Cotton kills. Cotton holds the cold. Wool holds the heat. I was alive because of that coat. I twisted around until I could reach the pocket and find out what was jabbing me in the side. It was the horn. The horn that I had taken from the locker on Haley’s boat when I found the flares. The horn that I had stuffed into my pocket and forgotten about.

BWAAANH. BWAANH. BWAANH. BWAANH. BWAANH.

I hit the switch over and over, lying there staring up at the sky, tears streaming down my face, until the policeman came and took the horn from my cold fingers and wrapped a silver-sided blanket about my shoulders.