Читать книгу Sarah/Sara - Jacob Marperger Paul - Страница 12

July 24

I did battle with charging waves of anxiety today; drinking is not my friend.

I cursed the sun last night. I asked it if it wanted to fight. I ripped a small willow tree out of the ground, cutting my hands. Its roots splayed broadly through layers of ancient peat. They were as thick as its branches. I howled and bit its trunk. I screamed. I threw stones at the water. In truth, without resorting to fire, without destroying my own chances of survival, it is fairly difficult to leave a mark of anger on the landscape. The sea absorbs thrown stones effortlessly. The stubby trees are too difficult to pull in any quantity. There’s really not much of anything to kick or punch. If there were grounded geese where I was camped, I might have killed one, covered my face in blood and a mixture of molting and new feathers; but there were none. If there were musk-oxen, I might well have been my own undoing. I did manage to get into my tent, knocking over the vestibule on the way in (fortunately, nothing was damaged), and then thrashing against my sleeping bag through the night.

What else did I expect? I spent a night writing to—writing to whomever—my plea against unorthodoxy, somehow wrote the story of a woman who fled from an unstoppable death. I don’t even know how to write it convincingly: her near death. This journal was meant to log the arctic for my parents in Shamaim who I must assume watch over me. Instead, I document the touchstones of despair, the neat, clean anecdotes of spiritual collapse, of death, of failure, of misery, in painless bite size chunks, swallowable whole. At a minimum, if I must dwell in the perpetual shadows of all of these stories, I want to capture in writing the pathos I feel. I can’t. My parent’s death brings personal gravity to everything I hear or imagine, but I can only access my own despair, the truth of my emotions, in the drunken rages that inevitably pursue my written declarations of resilience.

I woke early, head hammering, tent a stinking mess of alcohol-sweat, unwashed body, foul condensation. My mouth was glued shut with dried phlegm as were my eyes. I crawled out from under the flapping vestibule wall whose collapse had eliminated any ventilation in the night, made my hovel into a plastic shopping bag of human moisture. The sun wasn’t any higher or lower on the horizon, due south, but it was right in my eyes, just neutral enough through all that atmosphere to tempt me, in my fuddled state, into staring right at it a moment. I coughed and saw thousands of black suns ringed in orange when I shut my eyes. At least I will run out of alcohol soon enough.

I pulled off my orange fleece, already well-funkified even before I’d passed out in the steam bath wearing it. The left arm was matted with something sticky and sweet, soaked in whatever deep enough that my arm hair was similarly matted. I cursed before remembering I didn’t curse. I put a cooking-gas-flavored finger in my mouth and rubbed my teeth. When I took it out, where I should have seen a water ring of white plaque, an image of beating out a mad rhythm on the hull of Abba’s kayak flashed in my head. I cursed again, and then cursed myself for cursing, and then just decided to give up and ran over to my boat. Sure enough, I’d managed to turn it upside down. Turning it back upright, I discovered how beaten my hands were, are. I have to be smart out here. This is stupid. It’s a good way to get myself dead. The other thing I discovered in turning my boat back over was just how much my pits stunk. It was time to wash.

I’m a basically modest person. And I’m an orthodox woman. And I’m shomrei n’giah, which means I have no physical contact with men I’m not immediately related to if I can at all help it (I make reasonable exceptions, especially on business trips, though it’s not as much an issue in Israel, where men are accustomed and conditioned to behavior like mine). I carefully looked up and down the beach, though really, I knew no one was there. Everything looked endlessly the same and horribly, terribly beautiful, as it always does: barren, broad, unending. Then I pulled off my tank top and undid my sports bra, which I had to hold at arms length afterwards. I rolled down my red rowing shorts. I couldn’t remember, can’t remember, the last time I felt a breeze on my bare body, the sun on my breasts. It’s cold; goosebumps spread from my pale chest out onto my brown arms. My nipples hardened. I tiptoed over to the tent, shells biting into the soles of my bare feet. Clothing stowed, I ran my hands down my butt, over my thighs, my calves, along ridges and lines, crisscrosses and circles, the contact with goosebumps and new skin sending shivers back up my now spare body, along the sides of my torso, my teeth chattering. I steeled myself, hammering head and freezing body, and walked into the sea.

I’d lost sensation in my feet before my breasts reached the water. It felt like they’d been slapped with a pincushion. I forced myself to dunk my head, eyes open, and stare at my own bubbles rising the through the green ocean murk. Then I was racing for shore, blue, shivering uncontrollably. I grabbed my orange fleece and used it to squeegee the water off my body in long wet ripples, my hair plastered around my ears, numb in the light breeze coming down from the mountains, rolling out across the water. I felt as if I’d been in a mikvah, a purification bath. I felt cleansed, holy. I covered my nakedness and felt new beneath a set of purple capilene long johns, unworn, still redolent of synthetics and laundry soap. I was inspired. I da’avened for the first time this trip. Everything seemed infinitely better for a while, for about as long as it took to eat breakfast and break down the tent.

I was exhausted by the time I was ready to set off. I hadn’t slept much or well. My body ached, and I’d broken out in sweat stinking of old whiskey that quickly mixed with the sea-salt on my body in a sticky brine. With each new action, I caught an instant replay of the previous night, each came with a nauseous wave of embarrassment, of guilty regret. I felt like my head was underwater. I didn’t want to row.

But there is no time off from rowing. Yes, I gave myself a week’s margin against the weather, the closing of the ocean. But I’ve only been out here one week out of six. I’ve already begun to lose time. I cannot give up anymore, waste anymore, bet any of it away on a foolish hangover. I deserve my pain.

For a while, I simply felt a general malaise. The paddle’s rhythm eluded me. Then I began to sober with labor. My headache developed into a tense vivid thing. My stomach kept contracting. A breeze kicked up and I began to raise the sail before realizing I didn’t have the pontoons out (of course they weren’t out. I was rowing and they slow me. And I didn’t build them as well as Abba built the hull of the kayak). I turned in to shore, landing on a patch of dirt sheltered in the undercut of a tundra bluff barely taller than myself, forcing me to crouch while attaching everything. Crouching gave me cramps, which gave me—well I had to let go of the boat a minute and squat, and I thought the boat would be ok. It began drifting and I had to go in after it, one hand desperately trying to pull up my pants, which wasn’t such a good idea because I hadn’t had a chance to wipe. I caught the boat easily, but my pants were wet and cold and my butt itched. I pulled it back to shore and tried to tie it up. There wasn’t anything reasonable to anchor it against, and eventually I found myself with one leg on the land, one wrapped around a pontoon rail, trying to wipe.

Eventually, I got the sails up and set off. By now, my hangover, the wet of my pants legs, the chill and immobility were all conspiring against me in earnest. That’s when I began to think the hull was sinking ever so slowly. Not really sinking so much as riding lower in the water. Perhaps it’s just the sail, I thought, pushing the bow under a bit. I lowered the sail to see, and the hull did seem to rise somewhat. I raised the sail again and the hull seemed to stay level, but then a moment later, it looked like it had sunk somewhat again. A burning coal seam on the shore had forced me out quite a ways onto the sea; I’d rather dodge stray ice chunks than breathe burning coal smoke and the chop wasn’t bad. But now I wished I was closer to shore. I wished I was somewhere I could pull over easily. It occurred to me that I was committed; I am on a ride I cannot get off.

And at that moment I could not be on the water any longer. I hauled sail and tacked in towards a smoking ridge of gray rock surrounded by black desert. And for the first time this trip, I pulled up my sea-skirt and reached back for my PFD. I slipped it over my head and though I’d been cold a minute ago, the formed life vest set me to sweating. But my hands were freezing. The wind whispered east ever so subtly and I was in the middle of that crazed phantasmagoric smoke, coughing. Coughing, eyes tearing and stinging, blinded. I tacked back out again. Breathe as slowly as you can, Sarah. Try not to breathe at all, but then breathe.

I reassured myself that even if the hull had a leak, even if the whole boat swamped, the float bags would keep the boat going. I tacked away from the smoke. I forced myself out towards the ocean. My heart raced and I thought I would puke. The sea loomed dizzily in front of me, floating ice drifts at the edge of the blue horizon warped and quivered. My heart was going so fast and yet there was no blood in my body. I tacked closer in towards shore, I tacked so that I could see the smoldering ruins of hills where coal had ruptured the surface and now burned interminably. I breathed soot-laden air in great grateful gulps. More than anything, I wanted to be in my parents’ Northport home, in my growing up bedroom, on my waterbed, in the dark. I wanted dark.

They should call them uncertainty attacks. Or maybe even more accurately, certainty attacks. Or maybe both. Certainty: my kayak rode lower in the water than the day before. Certainty: I’d drunkenly gone after my own boat the night before, an attack that could have damaged it. Uncertainty: I couldn’t visualize ever filling the float bags with air. Uncertainty: I had no confidence in my hull-inspection capabilities this morning.

The fact remained, in my head, I could sink. And if I sank, could I swim? My father would recite the arctic drowning statistics like favorite poems, like onomatopoeic tongue twisters, the tan wrinkles around his eyes contracting with pleasure. Within two minutes the body begins to go completely numb, five minutes and you stop trying to swim, ten minutes and you’re gladly gulping water instead of air, if you’re bothering to breathe at all. That’s if you’ve got your PFD on. The leading cause of death for Inuit kids is drowning. And they know how to swim. And they know the arctic.

I began to calculate my chances. I figured I was about three hundred yards from shore. I tried to do the math, divide swim times by distance, while accounting for a gradual drain of energy as I spent myself. But all I could think was, I want to get off. I want to get off. I want to get off.

There is no getting off this ride, Sarah. The only way you’ll go home is if you row another five weeks east.

You row, every single day.