The Last Ship (27 page)

For a moment, aware of the piercing fixity of their stares upon us, I had felt the fear that they blamed us for what had happened, seeing we were whole men. But had this been so, surely they would have come beating at us. They stood rather in an immense silence, as if blaming no one; stood infinitely resigned, in a fabulous acquiescence, a voiceless submissiveness, beyond all bitterness, all hatred, as though such human feelings were no longer available to them, that in the same precise sense in which they had been deprived of the right to use previously possessed physical attributes, so had they been deprived of the privilege of either feeling or expressing previously possessed human emotions. They stood in the bright stream of sunlight as though all was night within them; in a reclusion complete and impregnable, unbroken by the slightest whisper of hope, whatever they may have had left of moments or hours, weeks or months, rolling on in an impenetrable gloaming. They did almost no moving about, as if they knew they must hoard every drop of strength, for the most part standing mutely—though some were too weak even for that and simply sat in the sand. Those that did attempt now to move nearer us shuffled noiselessly over the sand, with a spastic effort taking two staggering short steps or three and then halting, as if giving profound consideration to the immense question of whether they might after all be able to manage one step more, or two, then simply collapsing in the sand before pushing themselves up again. They put one in mind of toddlers learning to walk. In that manner some came very near and then stopped and stood staring at us, eyes turning slowly in their sockets, focusing hard on us, at this intense almost point-blank range, with feverish concentration, as though in poignant wonder at seeing complete people. The stench of their bodies, of their flesh! I will not speak of that. Among them was a young woman as yet still possessed of shining long black hair about whom there was a suggestion that once she may have had great beauty—part of her face was gone, part . . . she still wore a pretty earring on the one ear that remained . . . I can no longer put down the words to describe her; I abandon myself to the reader’s indulgence.

Sounds now began to stir from within them. Their voices seemed to come from afar. At first, the faintest of murmurs. Then from some a sort of gurgling, now a species of choking, a fight against strangulation, now a convulsive catching of the breath, as though in search of language, a paroxysmal soblike noise, incoherent stammerings, sounds like none we had ever heard, from lips swollen and blackened, lips that trembled. They emitted cries almost inaudible, distant moanings, something that was neither talking nor sobbing but that partook of both. An aphasia, plaintive and deadened, a sound of wonderment, a mournful resonance of voices, confused throaty vibrations. A rising murmur both gentle and powerful, both immense and faint, seemed to emanate from them. A kind of keening, as from a distant chorus. This was almost the hardest part of all for us to bear, for the gulf it put between us. A private inaccessible and unlearnable language it seemed, known only to themselves: It made them seem off in some great and inarticulate solitude which we could never enter, from which they could never be reached, to place them standing on some far shore, inadmissible to ourselves, forever outsiders.

All the time the doc was going from one to the other of them, assisted by the two hospital corpsmen, Lockridge and Hicks, her face and his both a controlled blankness, digging into bags, working silently, almost automatically, the compulsive work of those who know that all their best professional efforts will avail little, will at most bring but moments of anodyne before the thing that was devouring their patients resumed its steady irreversible business. As they worked, we—that is, the three of us who spoke their formal language, the Jesuit, Palatti, and myself—undertook to converse with them, to penetrate their mystery and their secret, to make some sort of headway against the boundless ignorance of which we felt ourselves victims. Tried to get information on what had happened. We got almost none beyond what we had already surmised. They stood or shuffled in the sand in a kind of daze of bewilderment at these strange and absurd interrogations. Their answers were as though having to make their way through some deep and darksome mist, full of haziness and confusions, of a riddlelike vagueness, an elusive disconcertion that seemed less to answer questions than to pose more, answers whose imprecision seemed less of deliberateness than of a profound incapacity to deal with the matter, a hopelessness at translation not of language but of experienced event, forever recondite to those who had not known it, without terms whatsoever of reference, not subject to the revelatory. Out of their murmurings and babblings, their dronings and susurrations, we could just piece together their efforts to tell us that their land was made sterile, would not produce growing things, their field animals stricken in any case, cows producing no milk (there were intimations of other human beings alive in the hills behind them, less fortunate than themselves, unable entirely to make the journey to the shoreline), and so they had come to stand on the beaches, for no other reason than that that was where the land ran out. It made great sense: They had not lost their power to reason. The land was nothing now, offered no refuge, relief, or sustenance: That they were able to convey. It was as though the land had rejected men, had said to them, Out! Begone! The only possible place of safety remaining was the sea, so their objective had been to get as close to it as possible; also from there they could mount lookout with what sight they had left for help from the sea. If any help were to come at all it had to come from the sea. There was no assurance that it would come. But there was nothing else left. Nothing but to go to the beach that lined the sea; to go where the land ended; there to stand, to wait.

I do not mean to suggest that they gave us these gleanings of events, these scraps of facts, with the logic perhaps suggested above. Their voices spoke in fragments, in hushed incantations, incoherencies, discordancies, seeming to come groping out from within some void previously unjourneyed by humans in which they stood, breathed, and lived yet. The air was filled with allusions, with contradictions, with obscurities in which they seemed mortally unable to keep their attention focused for more than the briefest period. A single simple question would send them into a long and agonizing meditation, followed by a huddling consultation among themselves, a shrill clamor, an abrupt babble of discursiveness and disputation. Sometimes at a question they simply turned and stared wordlessly at each other in profound distraction. We made a desperate effort to penetrate their meanings; it was infinitely painful going. But we could discern enough from their sounds, a clear word here, another there, to construct this plausible synthesis. It was like putting together the pieces of a ghastly puzzle, the essence of which was that their towns and their villages had not received any direct hit but, being not far south of Naples, where a great light as of a thousand suns had been seen from afar followed by the night darkness and black vapors of giant clouds, had been accorded the peculiar and idiosyncratic mercy of becoming side effects as opposed to intentional targets. After a while it seemed to us cruel to go on questioning them, heartless and brutal to exploit them in that fashion, and so we stopped it. What right indeed had we to use them as sources of information? To ask them anything? And what interest could they possibly have in giving it? They were beyond all information. Whatever the accurate information was, it no longer mattered in the least. Information itself had become useless, senseless, even obscene. Information had ceased to exist.

“Captain?”

I turned, startled to hear a simple coherent word.

“Yes, Mr. Selmon.”

He looked up from his counter meter. “Sir, it’s time. We should clear out.”

We left them some food Girard had brought and some medicine. It was so little. And we might need the stores for our own survival. But we had to do something. It would only prolong it and that but for a brief time. But we had to leave something. It was for ourselves really, not for them. Because they had once been what we were. They were of us. And we left these oblations also because of a curious thing in us for which one felt only shame. Seeing them made one feel intensely alive.

A
board ship I went to my cabin, closed the door, and broke down sobbing. It was the first time I had done that, and the last. With the responsibilities, the burden, that lay upon me, I knew one thing above all. Anguish had become a sin.

It was as though I had crossed over some great divide, some immense and agonizing moral chasm, separating me from all that was not my affair, and turning all my thinking, all my resolve and dedication, to the one thing that was; a resolve almost brutal in its ferocity. From that time forward I thought of nothing but my ship’s company and the ship, the two of course being indivisible. It was not so strange really. Given two sets of human beings, one for whom one can do nothing and the other of a quite survivable character, even humanity itself dictates that one’s efforts be consecrated to the latter, a moral choice. The fact that these were my own, of my blood in the most profound way, that of a ship’s captain to those given unto his care, immutable as any bond between father and sons and daughters, of course immeasurably strengthened this resolve. To this end, the first thing needed with some urgency, I felt, was simply to remove us physically from the imminent danger. Thus it was that I made straight out for sea. Not until we were actually out of sight of land did I set a course back to the north, proceeding in that direction according to the original plan of determining habitability along the upper Italian littoral. At a much-reduced speed, the ship progressing with solitary slowness through the water, chiefly to give us time to collect ourselves, only with the most thoughtful gentleness troubling the unruffled blaze of the sea that favored our course. Indeed, during nearly our whole voyage in what was to follow, the Mediterranean held to that tranquillity, of mirrorlike waters luminescent under ardent sunshine and perfect azure skies, so often pictured in those splendid cruise posters, though by no means omnipresent, as her sailors know, in these waters in which one quite often experiences high Beauforts lashing raging seas.

From the first our ship’s company was possessed of one supreme knowledge as of an unvoiced sacred vow, the rigorous adherence to which, as I have mentioned, I believe carried our very salvation: We could survive only by not speaking of it. Those who had remained aboard did not ask the dozen of us who had gone ashore what we had seen there. I suppose it was our faces that told them what they needed to know. I did make up my mind to one thing: On our subsequent stops, should we raise other human life on the shore, I would vary the personnel of the beach party until I had gone through the entire crew. This was for two reasons. I felt I did not want to expose the crew to more than one experience of that sight (not to speak of the potential emotional and mental dangers, several of those who had gone ashore were violently ill for short periods once they returned to the ship, nausea, vomiting, fevers, states of depression, and the like)—except of course for Selmon, whom we had to have along for our own safety to take the readings; the doc, whom we had to have for professional purposes; and finally the Jesuit, both for his priestly office and the fact that, something of a linguist, he added fluent French to his Italian. And the second, opposite reason, that I actually wanted all aboard to see it once. And I accomplished this. Before we were through, every hand had made that trip ashore. To see the land people.

 *  *  * 

So began our “sweep” of the Mediterranean, up past Civitavecchia and Castiglione, past Livorno and Viareggio, north to Genoa, then on a westerly course off the beaches and shorelines of France and Spain, making for Gibraltar. First along the shores of the northern Tyrrhenian, then along the Côte d’Azur, small clusters of human beings stood on the beaches looking seaward. But what were they doing standing there? What could it be save to hope that some ship, such as ours, would come along and rescue them. Take them aboard. But we could not do that. First of all, we simply hadn’t the space. And even if we had, their illnesses, their infections, their contaminations, possibly of a nature no medical knowledge or pharmaceuticals we possessed could deal with, might easily spread to us, make of us a diseased and doomed ship and crew, take us, one by one, down with them. I counted, as I have noted, that my duty was owed to my crew and my ship. The land people would only bring more problems, more emotions, aboard. We would do well to survive with our own present sum of problems and emotions.

At first we stopped and sent a beach party ashore in a boat, for two purposes: to do what we could to help them by way of leaving medicines and food; and to attempt to solicit information. (A selfish altruism, in Proust’s phrase.) Our visits ashore were of varying duration, depending on Selmon’s readings, which were always high. We simply stood and dealt with them until Selmon said, “It’s time, Captain,” the phrase, instantly to be obeyed, he had adopted. Sometimes he allowed us two hours ashore, sometimes as little as a half hour. What we found: Essentially, for all purposes, it was everywhere the same. Oh, the conditions of the shore people varied in degree: some better than those we had encountered below Amalfi; some worse. Some charred more, some less. Some stops with more blind ones, some with fewer. Some more profoundly afflicted with areas of invaded and desecrated flesh: rampant sores, ravaging lesions and ulcerations, tumorous growths, diverse stigmata and mortifications; some less so. Some with more of their bodies remaining in their possession and control, some with less. Hair loss varying. Loss of gums and teeth varying. Degrees of overt bleeding varying. But every stop one thing was the same: They assumed that we were going to take them aboard; indeed that we had stopped for that express purpose. Their expectant looks mutely articulated the fact. At every stop the most dread moment of all for us came to be that moment when it was time for us to leave and the people saw with disbelief that they were not to accompany us to the ship standing off. As the great fact became clear to them, they responded in an almost instantaneous changefulness which we at no time could predict. Sometimes they were utterly mute, standing there in the sand, only their gleaming and entreating eyes following us as we headed for the boat, with timorous and expectant gazes, in them the desolation of those who, knowing only suffering and pain, see departing their last and only hope; just the silence and the disbelief, standing in dumb immobility, only their feverish eyes judging us, these alone speaking to us of their horror and incredulity at this desertion; eyes full now of longing, now of appeal, full now of hate. It was not an easy thing to feel those eyes upon you as you prepared to step into the boat and make for the ship waiting there in the distance with her security, with her cleanness, her safety: her food, her medicines, her clothing; above all her mobility. Sometimes abruptly turning abject and imploring, a sobbing and a wailing of lamentation filling the air, tearful entreaties, some dropping to their knees, falling at our feet, clutching and pulling at our legs and trousers, begging us to take them with us. We had to disengage ourselves from these seizing hands. Sometimes with no warning turning hostile and menacing, their frail and depleted forms toiling across the sandy space between us, facing off to us and overwhelming us with a sudden and savage rage, an accusatory litany of noises raving and shrieking in which we seemed to detect that they held us, being warriors, responsible for everything that had happened to them and that we owed it to them as some small measure of atonement to take them aboard ship.

We would have been fearful for our safety had they been whole human beings. At one place, seeing we were not going to take them, they shouted at us that one word that is the most vile in the language to a sailor. “Cowards!” At another—a small fishing village between Nice and Antibes, by name Saint-Laurent-du-Var—on becoming aware of this same fact, that they were not to accompany us, they picked up rocks, shells, anything on the sand they could lay hands on, and began to throw them at our beach party. They were so feeble that most of the rocks fell pitifully short. Then they rushed us. As they came upon us we needed only to push them back, almost gently, as one would a child, and they immediately collapsed like rag dolls onto the sand. We got in the boat and started out. Some of them waded out and tried to climb into the boat and we had to push these away also with the same gentleness, to pry their fingers off the gunwales, as they fell back into the water and we headed back to the ship standing in the distance. After that incident we began to approach the beach more cautiously. And also to go armed in order if necessary to repel those who might try to board our boat. The weapons were never needed, so weakened and wasted of body were the shore people, hardly fit to attack anything.

They were the land people. We were the sea people. That now was become the great distinction. Of course, it had always been a large difference, that between these two kinds of people. But it had never been so vast a gulf as now. They, the land people, now lived where they were not wanted—the land no longer desired human beings. They were not welcome. We, the sea people, lived where what was beneath us tolerated us as it always had. So that all of those standing on the beaches now longed desperately to be where we were. And, of course, we could not take them. This itself began to do something to the men. I could see it. In differing ways. Some it hardened in a determination that we should not let one soul of them aboard lest we endanger ourselves. Some of these even expressed something like contempt for the land people: They had made their bed, let them lie in it. These resented even our giving them anything at all from our stores. Others of the crew it brought to the very limits of compassion, that we must try to do something for them. And we did. For a while we gave them food, medicine, clothing. As we began to pass by some of the clusters on the beaches, rather than stopping at each, some of the compassionate ones even tried to sneak stores ashore on little ingenious handmade floats which they cast on the incoming tide to the land people. Then such compassion, such generosity, began, looking far enough ahead, to endanger our own stores, our own survival.

Indeed it was two of my officers whom I considered as essentially among the most compassionate of human beings who came to me and insisted, in tones as aggressive as I had ever heard from them, that I put a stop to it. One was Lieutenant Girard. “Captain, we just cannot afford to give any more food away,” she said, looking at me out of some reluctant inner ruthlessness. The doc used almost identical language, speaking of our medical stores. So that I had to issue strict orders against it, post notices, captain-signed, that anyone found giving any of ship’s stores to the land people would be subject to the severest discipline. Some of the compassionate ones even wanted to take the land people aboard. “And when the ship begins to sink because of their numbers?” I asked them. “What then?” Brutally. “Or if they begin to contaminate us all so that we have what they have—what then?” Then finally I had enough of it. I said to the compassionate ones: “Very well. If you want them aboard so much, any one of you may trade places with any one of them. A human being for a human being. You pick which one when the ship stops at the next beach. Then get ready to stop ashore yourself.” It was a bluff but that put a stop to it. No, it didn’t, not quite. At the little port of Cavalière, Hurley, seaman apprentice, tried to do just that. Picked out a child who was hanging on to his sailor’s dungarees and turned to me. “Captain, take her. I’ll stay.” I just looked at him. “No, Hurley,” I said. “You will not. Get into the boat.” When he didn’t I ordered the men to seize him and place him there. They had to drag him away from the child.

It had become so bad I began actually to fear that it would destroy the crew, tear the ship apart. The shore people: their pleading, their exhortations, their begging one moment, in their utter abasement falling to their knees, humbling and prostrating themselves as before gods, with clasped hands beseeching us to take them aboard, clutching our persons in their convulsive sobbing, their violent outbursts of grief, their desperate kisses on our trouser legs, their falling tears on our shoe-tops. Some even pressed futile, pitiful, absurd gifts upon us; men pulling out wallets and emptying them of money, wadding this worthless stuff into our hands; women offering jewelry, rings, earrings, bracelets—offering themselves; casting off every restraint, sometimes pushing their children forward as if at least surely we would take these. The next moment coming at us with a gleaming ferocity, a screeching fury, literally clawing at us in their frenzy, screaming at us the most loathsome imprecations as if we were demons, monsters, directly responsible for their condition, full of every obligation to take them aboard. These were shaking experiences, taking a fearful toll on the crew; it was getting to the men, decimating them, tearing them apart in onsets of agonizing dismay. I knew I had to stop it for the salvation of ship’s company itself; if I were to save ourselves—from corruption, from sin, from disaster. So I ceased stopping at any beaches whatsoever, passing by all clusters of human beings.

By now all ship’s company had seen at least once the people on the shore, according to my intentions. We stopped going in altogether. So that at last that question which had kept recurring like a pounding and terrible metronome in our minds and which seemed to shake the ship, “What is there to be done for them?” gave back its nonappealable answer, “Nothing, nothing, nothing.” In sure finality can come a kind of solace. Sometimes we were signaled from the shore by people waving white flags that looked like bedsheets as if to suggest that they could not possibly harm us and were seeking only a parley between land and sea people. Sometimes sending out their cries for help which drifted distantly and feebly over the water as we passed by. Sometimes, waving nothing, they just stood motionless on the beach, looking to seaward. Certainly we had established that there was no habitability to be found here, anywhere on the Mediterranean littoral. Not once did any of Selmon’s readings even approach a definition of that state, and as for the sought information, everything we were able to extract from those on all these strands agreed on one thing: that behind the shorelines matters were far worse; this fact indeed being the stimulus that drove the people to the beaches, they being the able ones, unlike those they left behind, competent, if often barely, to make the journey. We passed by these pitiful souls, these specters on the shore, and continued our journey; finally, so as to free ourselves of cries and supplications to which we had no answer, I ordered a course that kept us out of sight of the land entirely, increasing our speed, the destroyer slicing cleanly through the cobalt waters of the Mediterranean. We had to move along. For another reason, our diminishing nuclear fuel. I have no idea how much of it we will need to find a home.