Dead Sea

George floated in the slimy water, wondering maybe if it was contaminated with something. Maybe the ship had been carrying chemicals and maybe that weird water quality was due to the fact that they were bobbing in a sea of toxic waste. Sure, he found himself thinking, you’re probably already poisoned, shit’s eating through your skin.

A normal explanation like that would have been almost preferable.

“Was it better or worse than this?” George asked. “That other time?”

Gosling wouldn’t qualify it, though. “Well, water was cold. And there was this shark that kept circling me. Never came close. Just circled. When I was on the buoy, he finally gave up.”

“Shit, you must’ve been terrified.”

“Was. At first. But after a time and he didn’t attack, I got used to him. Called him Charlie. I talked to him all the time. The only time I was really afraid was at night when I couldn’t see him.”

“And he never attacked?”

“Nope. Never even came close.”

“Well, if a shark comes along,” George said, “you talk to him.”

That made Gosling laugh, only it wasn’t a good sort of laughter.

They floated on, the water around them gelatinous and syrupy, clumps of weed drifting past from time to time. The water was warm like a mud bath, but the air was chill and dank. It made steam boil from the surface. And the fog? Yellow and white, billowing and thick like a fine cottony weave, charged with that ghostly radiance. It was moist on their faces, left a greasy residue on their skin.

That stink was there, too, but they were used to it now and didn’t smell it much more than a bum smells his own body odor.

George was wondering when his lifejacket would get saturated and he’d go down like a brick, down into those awful black depths. The idea of that made him shiver, despite the heat surging around him. It was hard to imagine all that water beneath him. Like some huge alien world that only fish, crawling things, and dead men ever saw. He could almost see it down there himself. Desolate mountain ranges and abyssal pockets of blackness. Like the geography of some distant planet, some submerged graveyard.

George was thinking this, knowing such morbid thoughts were probably not a good idea, and that’s when he saw something drifting in their direction not ten feet away. That crazy shine in the fog was reflecting off its surface which looked smooth and wet and oddly circular.

“Hell is that?” Gosling said, a note of panic in his voice.

George was looking at it, shivering again now, thinking it looked like some immense, rubbery eyeball rising from the depths. And the idea of that made him go hollow inside.

“Jesus… I think,” Gosling began, “I think… I think it’s a survival raft.”

They started paddling over there, Gosling in the lead. George trying to keep up with him. As they got close, George could see it was nothing so fantastic as an eyeball, but something the general shape of a donut. It didn’t look much like a raft, but then he realized it must have inflated upside down. When they boarded the Mara Corday, Gosling went through the drill with all of them. Lifeboat stations and the like. He had explained to them that the survival rafts were in containers and would inflate automatically, that if the containers were submerged in ten or twelve feet of water-like if the ship sank-a hydrostatic mechanism would release the rafts and they’d bob to the surface, inflating.

Gosling and he took hold of the righting strap and heaved back with everything they had. On the third try, the raft broke the suction of the water and flipped over, sending George underwater momentarily. He came back up, gasping and spitting water from his mouth. Maybe he couldn’t smell the stink of it any more… but the taste, the feel of it in his mouth was horrible. Like a mouthful of slime warm as bathwater. Sickening.

Gosling thought it was pretty funny. “I told you she’d come over quick when she did,” he said.

George ignored him. The raft was big now that it was floating right side up, looked something like a tent floating on tubes. Just the feel of it made George feel safer, stronger. His fingers closed on the rungs of its small boarding ladder. He and Gosling hung there for a moment and caught their breath. This, they decided, was an unbelievable bit of luck. And when you considered that heavy fog, it was surely that.

Gosling pulled himself aboard and then helped George in.

“Home sweet home,” George said, curled up on the deck plates.

He was grateful to be out of that water. The raft had a canopy overhead that you could zip free if you needed to. It was wonderful to be in there, to be in a dry enclosed space. The raft was built to accommodate a dozen men, so there was plenty of room.

“She’s a beauty,” Gosling said, “our savior is.”

And she was.