After he gives you your leave, you lay hammocked in the dark belowdecks, listlessly chewing dried apple. Other sailors sleep, the air yeasty, cave-like, and you all are the suspended bats. The other sailors now keep you at cool distance. They don’t trust you.
You remain undercover—still a violent mercenary, but now secretly aligned with the Captain and his revolutionary smuggling operation, tasked to ferret out the man who plots against them all. Two days, the Captain said. Two days to find the spy.
But he doesn’t know that the spy is you.
Two days to achieve your real mission: possess the protected cargo–and, with it, flee.
This tough apple slice doesn’t help with the gnawing hunger. You don’t know the last time you ate. It’s a flaw of yours: even as a child, your mother chided you for forgetting meals. Your father, too, though less with words than sighs of remonstration. Always at a remove, that one. The tall body that moved distantly through the house, his face that rarely, if ever, turned to you. Did he ever feel the same restlessness that has led you to this place? Office man, salaryman. Never seemed happy, all the way up until he was killed in a motoring collision while on a business trip. Then as a boy and in your memory now he was a shadow moving through the house of your mind.
Perhaps he felt this same way. Overwhelmed by society—affronted, wearied, agitated. If so, your rancor is less the fault of society than an elemental bubbling in your blood. A gift from father to son.
Maybe – and this new thought jolts you – your father was a spy.
All those trips. Always gone, always turned away, his death under those mysterious circumstances. Strange parties your parents took you to – how far away the parties? What strange estates in what hidden woods? The hushed conversations, the men with false names. (And that other: the one in the backseat: the one on the beach, the hands around your neck, holding you beneath the water: that other voice there with you all the time: that other face you still can’t see: the skeptic: the punisher: the sibling: the brother.
Or was it? Was it perhaps the self along? The doubt within you?)
You chew. The ship shifts with a new wind, the bulwarks groan, the hammock sways. Chew, chew. Throughout your life you have seen your father’s grim countenance in the faces of other men. That man in the office, in the town, had a certain likeness. The Captain—something about the eyes. All these shades. It’s as if, you think, that your father has come back to keep everwatch on you, and then at midships a round ball of iron tears through the hull not thirty feet from where you hang. You spin off your hammock. The ball has torn through the body of a sleeping sailor: a leg falls from a hammock, followed by a wet slap of blood.
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