Architects Are Here (40 page)

It’s hard, Rolly said, to watch other people doing physical work when youre not. Observing is self-conscious work. So I often end up gutting fish instead.

They did gut fish and David got good at it. It was true what they say about sharp knives.

They caught fish no one had seen before. The crew gathered around Rolly Junger, who had a large book to identify fish. He photographed the fish and put it in the ledger. Then jumped into the hold on deck where they dumped the net, and poked with his knees through the catch looking for oddities. There was an angler fish that has an extension of its body that hangs out in front of its mouth. It’s a kind of fishing lure, Rolly said. A lot of the fish from down that deep are all black.

They were on a large factory freezer trawler. David followed Rolly Junger along the winding path to the meal plant. At the end of all the paraphernalia was a man filling one bag after another with warm sweet meal.

After ten days the captain said they were to unite with a provision boat and be gone another six weeks. David was to transfer over. Some of the crew transferred over, and new crew came aboard. And then Jason Linegar came aboard and talked to the captain. That’s how David transferred over to the provision boat operated by Russians. Jason Linegar was a cook aboard the boat. Youre to bunk with me, he said. They had been at sea for six months, Jason Linegar said. People had plants in their cabins. The captain had a radish garden on the roof of his cabin and tomatoes inside. There was a little dog. There was a chess tournament. Moonshine made in a corner cupboard. Back scrubbers were knotted and looped out of disassembled onion bags. People engaged in a lot of crafts and a game like backgammon. Lots of tea drinking. Tchai. You heard the word constantly. The only other word heard as often was fish. Ribka.

There were some musical instruments. David was in Jason Linegar’s cabin. The crew piled in, drinking tea, and a guitar entered. It went around the room and it was only when it came to David that there was someone who couldnt produce a song on it.

They steamed north. The sound of loose ice hitting the bow, no one liked it. When are we going to go back to port, David said. Jason:We’re off to the Grand Banks.

They were among a group of vessels that responded to a shrimp boat that sank from an ice puncture. When they arrived at the coordinates the crew had successfully been taken aboard another boat while three other shrimp boats floated there and watched a swirling mass of water where the sinking ship had been only moments before. Then odds and ends like life jackets started popping to the surface.

David woke to breakfast on the Russian boat. He began to forget there was a life on solid ground. He ate a kind of rye bread that was baked on board, the dough mixed in a huge industrial mixer that was probably working overtime. Bread on a Russian boat was the staple food, Jason Linegar said. Bread with butter. This is significant because butter was only served at breakfast and teatime. The crew used the butter like cheese. Cutting off thick slabs of it.

The longer I spend on Russian boats, Jason Linegar said, the more butter I put on my bread. Usually bread and butter and tea, that’s it. There’s no coffee served in the mess on Russian boats. Coffee is a scarce commodity.

David: If I’d known I’d have brought some.

Once in a while there’s some sweet bread made as a treat.

T
HE LAST NORMAL THING
David did was sit on his bunk and eat a can of peaches. He could taste the metal of the tin on the blade of his spoon. Then he read a book and fell asleep.

It was something about the hinges on the door. On the dark seam between door and wall. An animal was pulsing through the seam. It was moving too fast to catch. The pelt was full of blur. David strained his eyes for more light. Then the floor slanted up to meet the hinge and sank away again, as though the animal was a mink and the floor some kind of den mouth. There was the animal again. The floor was where the floor was, and then it lifted up to the arching animal. Or the surface lifted. It wasnt the floor it was a varnish lifting from the floor, some kind of transparent linoleum. A material was being pulled through the gap in the bottom of the door now like a magician and a sleeve.

David looked at the grey corner or was it blue. He put on his expensive glasses. An empty can floated in the air towards the blue. He recognized the can. It was the can of peaches. It was nudging itself in the corner. Then he saw the book he was reading, bloated and staggering about. He felt pulled towards the corner too. It was as if the metal of the walls had gone magnetic. Then the feeling hesitated and the can turned around and bumped into the novel and then floated over to the centre of the room. Its label was peeling off. There was a plastic bag with air in it, just there twirling about in the middle of the air, a well-used white bag. He heard a wind under his bunk. It felt like a cold wind for there was a sound to it. There was something weighty under the bed. The word
slosh
occurred to him. There was water in the room. A lot of water. Things on shelves were tiptoeing around the room. They were going for little swims. His blanket was heavy. It was sodden. The edges and now the bunk moved or lifted off a leg. They had yawed over. He could not shove himself from the side of the wall. Water crept up behind him and surprised his back. He tasted it. Sea water. Linegar’s small globe of the earth buoyed past his chest. He saw South America.

He entered the water. He had to hold on to the bunk. He was up to his thighs and he was, technically, standing on the side of his bunk, such was his angle. Linegar was not in the room. So a side of the room was full of water. Maybe Linegar had turned into water. David made his way up to the door. But he could tell there was a lot of water on the other side of it. It was rushing quietly through the gap at the floor and now the one at the ceiling. The deadbolt was saving him. Then he heard a shout and a bullet of outrage zipped up his spine.

He fell into the cold water and was thrown up against the door. His head hurt and he cleared the water. Now the water was on him. The ship had righted. If I can get the door open. But now the water was behind him and on the door. The door had to open in. He realized he had his head against the door. He turned the lever and pulled. It was a heavy metal door. He tugged against the sucking. He jammed himself into the opening. Then he popped through and hit the wall across from the door. The hall was emptying down of water. The water was a bowling ball. Bulbs in cages were lit in a dirty glow on the ceiling. Then Linegar. He saw Jason Linegar halfway down the hall. Linegar was perched, jumping-jack fashion, in the doorframe of an open room.

David:What the fuck is going on.

Jason Linegar did not know what to do. At the end of the hall was a froth of water standing straight up to the ceiling. It was about to come back after him. Jason Linegar was going to run away from it, or close his door again.

I was paid, Jason Linegar said, five thousand dollars to take care of you. And now I won’t get to spend it.

That was the last he saw of Jason Linegar.

The water carried David around three corners. It was lucky water. He caught nothing sharp. The water pushed him up a floor and he grabbed ahold of a mounting that used to carry a fire extinguisher. He held on as the dark water reflected back onto him. Then with the space empty he walked out onto the deck. Water was still slooshing out of his trousers. His legs felt heavy. The ship was tilted in a swelling sea. The sea was less than an inch below the starboard side, breaking over. The ship was like a raft. The wind was raw and he realized he was freezing. A lifeboat had its keel broken on the trawler winch. A piece of fibreglass from the flydeck was hooked in the rigging. He pulled it out. A sheet of fibreglass eight feet long. The wind caught it out of his hands and it sliced his hands open. It made the sound of a drum. It pitched into the water and it floated. A panel of white streaming away from the stern. He fell into the sea and grabbed the panel and climbed aboard. It was enough to hold him. He curled his hurt hands into his body.

THIRTEEN

D
AVID WAS HOLDING ON
to a dead man. The dead man was wearing a yellow life jacket. Half his face was gone. A floating Russian had saved his life. He was under the wide hull of the coast guard vessel
Cape Roger
. Two container ships were parked on the horizon, and they were waiting for him. They were too big for search and rescue.

He had lost his pebble and his wallet and his shoes and trousers. Then he realized he was still wearing his glasses. The coast guard found him in just his shirt, and even the tails of his shirt and the sleeves of the shirt had been torn off. All the buttons. It must have been funny to see him like that, pretty much naked, but wearing his glasses.

It was a Norwegian-owned bulk carrier that spotted you, he heard a man say. A container ship did manage to rescue nine bodies from an overturned life raft. Corporal Al Spratt of the Halifax search and rescue centre said
Cape Roger
picked up one body.

Was he the body. Perhaps a body doesnt mean dead.

What David can recall is thinking about himself and who he must be. He thought of his friends gathered around a picnic and the friends popped into place as he remembered them. He wanted chicken and a glorious roasted chicken arrived but it was spackled with salt. He wanted the chicken rinsed in fresh water, wet chicken. Something from a childhood book: gingham sandwiches.

Corporal Al Spratt was saying, We thought there could be survivors, as your ship sank in the Gulf Stream.

Where was he. In some rescue vehicle. They had him folded into an emergency sleeping bag and Al Spratt was in there with him. The sleeping bag was too bright to be used all the time. It would keep you awake.

Two planes and four civilian ships are still looking.

He thought, they can stop looking.

If you find a person in the sea that’s a lucky person, Al Spratt said. You find a body, that’s a lucky family to have the body. The sea can hide you in a lot of places.

It was obvious Al Spratt was not by nature a talkative man. He was talking to keep David Twombly awake. He found he could not speak and that the drawings in his head kept multiplying.

One man was pulled out of the water after eighteen hours, Al Spratt said. Clinging to a dead crew member. Taken aboard the
Cape Roger
. They tried to get your body temperature up. You were put into this here warming bag, then John McCarthy, he’s a good man, he got the first shift. Body heat will warm you. You got John McCarthy pretty cold so I’m taking over. John says you were in a lot of pain.

He was stabilized and confused. Fifteen bodies had been recovered from his ship. Bodies meant they were dead. Filipinos, Lithuanians, Romanians, Montenegrins. David suddenly added them to the picnic. But he did not know them. He knew Linegar and where was he. And what did Linegar mean. Was he there to take care of him or to get rid of him. Was there a bounty on his head and maybe Jason Linegar had spread the word. A ship on its way to Montreal with a load of grain spotted him. It was Cypriot registered. Forty nautical miles off St Pierre. The wheelhouse blew off but the bow kept afloat by pockets of air. The only survivor this man here. The sea tore your clothes off. Were you the cook.

Yeah, David said, that’s me. I’m Jason Linegar.

David recalled talking to a Russian technician, Petra. He said it was a safe ship, but didnt have enough ballast. It was unloaded and could handle rough water. The ship’s agents won’t be returning calls.

Al Spratt was passing his warmth over to him. Trawlers and bulk carriers at this age, Al Spratt said, they seem to have a habit of breaking up. We want to make sure there’s compensation for your families.

It made him feel dead. David was at a picnic for the dead.

T
HEY ENJOYED HIM.
There were too many men helping with the stretcher. Both feet in thick white bandages like some cartoon of injury. His hands bandaged to the elbow and his head wrapped in white. He held his hands up, look at these hands. These hands move. They hustled him from the ambulance through a bend in the drive to the automatic Emergency doors that were not yet open. They had all wanted to see him, the only survivor. The heavy doors slid open and he was transferred to a trolley parked against the plaster wall. The Canadian cook, Jason Linegar.

H
E SPENT FOUR DAYS
at the Grace Hospital in St John’s recovering from frostbite and hypothermia. His true identity leaked out and he was now under police custody. They understood his situation but they could not pretend he was Jason Linegar. He hired a lawyer and was granted bail of fifty thousand dollars. David called me. He didnt have his passwords, he’d lost his pebble, he couldnt open his trading account and sell five thousand shares of Sunleaf. My father needs me, he said. He needs blood and he needs a kidney. My kidneys are a match.

You mean you have to return to Hurley territory.

If I want my father alive, he said.

This made me pause and he heard the pause.

You think, he said, this might be the end for me.

I dont think you should come back here.

You must help me to it, he said.

I walked down the road to the constabulary building and was led into the pound where the Matador had been cleaned and inspected and photographed. I checked the trunk and all of our gear was in there, even the box for the Taser. Toby was on the back shelf. They had kept the rifle, was all.

I showed Toby to Nell. She touched him. His shorn fur, the seams showing. He’s heavy, she said.

It’s the gold, I said. And I told her about the heat. David, I said, needs to be bailed out. I have to bring this gold to St John’s.

Okay, she said. I’m with you.

We drove the Matador across the island. It felt strange. It was Zac’s car. And now I was in it with Nell. I drove fast and we stopped in Badger and ordered pea soup and cheeseburgers and then Nell drove and she kept driving until the headlights lit up the rounded curb to the Health Sciences Centre. Six and a half hours. We found Dave not in bed but in a visiting room drinking coffee with a plainclothes police officer. David’s feet and hands were sensitive. He was leaking from one of his feet.