dead man walking

Jim wakes up underwater.

He floats through a dim, quiet space, a world with soft edges. His nostrils flare. His lungs expand as his body tries to breathe in. Saltwater floods his senses. Mouth, nose, eyes—it bursts on him like a wave and suddenly he is alive, underwater, unable to breathe.

He can’t breathe. He can’t breathe. He flails and thrashes, choking against the water in his airway, blind and deaf and surrounded by streams of bubbles. Water churns around him. He can’t think, but he knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that he has seconds before he drowns.

Then he breaks the surface of the water. He can breathe again. He takes deep, gasping breaths, churning his arms and legs so he doesn’t sink. He knew how to tread water, once—he did—but the panic is too fresh for him to remember. He can’t remember anything. None of it seems important, except keeping his head above water.

He blinks water out of his eyes. He feasts on each breath of air. The ocean stretches out ahead of him, endless, rippling with whitecap waves. The water is grey, like the sky. He takes another deep breath, kicks out to push himself up in time with a passing wave. He has done this before, but he can’t do it forever.

He sees a ship on the horizon. He catches it out of the corner of his eye and works his way around to face it. The ship moves in his direction, rocking with each wave that breaks against its side. It— she— is small, a sloop by the look of her, and moving fast. In a moment she’ll be on top of him. He backstrokes, trying to get away, dodge, trying to— something.

The sloop runs him down in no time at all. It looms over him. He has just enough time to think that the ship is going to crush him, because he can’t get out of the way in time, can’t move fast enough —and then the sloop steps aside neat as you please, the kind of elegant maneuver only a master helmsman could make. She runs up alongside him, riding high in the water. He stares up at the smooth wood of her hull.

A rope’s end lands next to him in the water. He startles, starts to sink, and panics again, beating back against the water.

“Grab the rope!” someone yells, and then another voice—“We can haul you in, but you have to grab on!”

Grab the rope. It’s a clear directive. Somehow it penetrates the layers of panic and confusion coating his brain. He reaches out—misses the rope once, twice, with hands so cold and stiff they look blue—and finally manages to grasp the rope. Immediately it tugs him forward, up to the side of the sloop. It doesn’t take much to lift him out of the water. He tries to brace his feet against the side of the sloop, without much success. He’s so cold, and suddenly so tired, that it’s hard to move. Hands grab at his body, his shoulders and arms and then his chest, and they pull him over the railing and onto the deck. There he collapses into a shivering puddle.

“A man walks into a bar with a giraffe,” a man says. Jim looks up. Two people stand over him, a man and a woman. Jim slides back against the railing, too tired and scared and cold to do anything else. The man keeps talking. “They both get pissed.” He has an English accent. It puts Jim on edge. “The giraffe falls over. The man goes to leave and the bartender says, ‘Oi, you can't leave that lyin’ there.’ And the man says, ‘No, it’s not a lion. It’s a giraffe.’” He laughs. Jim just stares at him, barely comprehending the words. The man scoffs. “Completely humorless,” he says, turning aside. “You two should get on.”

“What’s your name?” the woman says. It takes Jim a moment to process the question, and then another moment to find the right answer. The woman is dressed like a sailor—she wears a long blue coat over a sailcloth shirt and a pair of men’s pants. A brightly-patterned bandanna holds back her hair. She has dark skin, and darker eyes, and she looks at Jim with an unflinching stare.

“Jim,” he says, and that’s it; that’s all he has. His tongue feels heavy and swollen in his mouth; it’s hard to move his lips.

“I’m Mark,” the man says. He has blond hair. Jim’s just noticed that. “This is Selena.”

“Where am I?” The words break from his mouth before Jim even really thinks of them. His brain feels unmoored from his body, and he can’t seem to tie it down.

“You’re on the good ship Calypso, ” Mark said. “Welcome aboard.”

“We’re about a hundred miles from St. John,” Selena adds.

St. John. That sounds familiar. He knows where St. John is. He’s been there. “I was a sailor.” The words bubble up out of him. “I was—I was on a courier ship. The Draisine. We were out of St. Kitts, we were—” He remembers. “There was a storm.”

“Jim, is it?” The blond man, Mark, crouches down next to him. “I have some bad news.”

“The courier ship Draisine ran aground,” Selena says. “A month ago.”

“What? No. No, no—” More words. Jim’s mind races. “No, I was just there, yesterday, I was there.”

“There was a storm,” Selena says, her voice flat. “The ship went down with all hands.”

“I was—” Jim looks around, at the wood and ropes and the sloping deck of the ship. His chest feels heavy. His hands are so cold. “I was there. There was a storm, and we… we lost our foresail.” He remembers it—not suddenly. The memory has always been there, but only now does it coalesce in his brain, images and sounds stitched together. He remembers thunder and lightning. He remembers waves breaking over the bow of the Draisine, the deck sloping sideways, and he remembers the boom swinging down on him. And then waking up. “It was yesterday,” he says, but it sounds hollow.

“Right,” Mark says. He’s still on Jim’s level, more or less, crouching nearby with his arms braced against his knees. He looks at ease. “Okay. Jim? You think you can stand up?”

He puts out a hand. Jim flinches—just at the sudden motion, not because he’s scared—and then, when he realizes what Mark is trying to do, takes the offered hand and pulls himself up onto his feet. “That’s it,” Mark says, not unkindly. He leads Jim by hand across the deck. His broad, callused hand is a grounding presence, something tangible and real. It keeps Jim anchored to the deck.

“Where—” Jim falters. “Where are we going?”

“Below decks,” Mark says. “I’ll find some spare clothes, and you can get yourself dry.”

Jim is still dripping wet. He shivers, tucking his free arm close to his body to try and conserve heat. Mark leads him down a few steep stairs and through a narrow doorway, and then they are below decks, enclosed by wood. This, too, is familiar.

Mark lets go of Jim’s hand and ducks through another doorway into the hold. He has a hammock strung up in the corner, and a sea chest pushed against the bulkhead. Mark grabs a blanket off of the hammock. He opens the chest up and rummages through it with one hand.

“You’re about my size, yeah?” he says. Jim can’t come up with an answer. He doesn’t know what to say. He stares at the back of Mark’s head, at the rough-cut blond hair and the faint scar on his neck.

“What...” Jim’s voice is strained. He must have swallowed so much seawater when he almost drowned. I almost drowned. “What the fuck is going on?”

Mark looks back at him. His face, as broad and golden as the rest of him, is mostly impassive. “Well,” he says. “One minute we’re riding a calm winter sea, and the next we see someone drowning, miles away from anything.” He shrugs. “Then we pulled you out of the water.”

Jim thinks his mind might be falling apart. He can feel it, cracking into splinters just like the Draisine. “It was yesterday,” he says. “It was yesterday. We were—three hours out of St. Kitts, and I was on the dog watch. We were keeping an eye on the storm. Then the foresail comes loose and the jib falls—and then, then I wake up. Today. In the water. I wake up and I’m—I’m hallucinating, or—”

“Here.” Mark dumps a thick, fluffy blanket into Jim’s arms. It’s enough to startle Jim out of his rambling, at least for the moment. “Dry off. You can share my things for now.” He adds a pile of folded clothing atop the blanket. Jim sees a shirt, a knitted sweater, and a pair of pants—all warm and dry. “Don’t take too long, yeah?” With that, Mark steps out of the hold.

Jim stands in the hold, alone. He hears Mark climb the stairs and re-emerge on deck. He sets the blanket and the clothes down on top of Mark’s sea chest. Then, a few minutes later, he starts to strip out of his wet clothes. He can’t think of anything else to do.

⁂

Jim steps on deck in a set of clothes two sizes too big. Mark is taller than him, and a little broader. He’s rolled up the pants and used a bit of rope as a makeshift belt—he’s done that before—but there’s nothing to be done about the cotton shirt, and the grey wool sweater. At least they’re warm and dry.

“There he is.” Across the deck, Mark gives a wry grin. He ties a rope up to a wooden cleat. “Feel better?”

Jim nods. His hair is still wet, his hands still shaking, but he’s mostly dry, and wrapped up in warm clothing to keep out the biting wind. He doesn’t feel quite so close to losing his mind. “Thank you,” he says, belatedly, to Mark. Mark nods at him and then busies himself with another rope, making minute adjustments to the Calypso ’s sails. Jim turns to see Selena standing at the helm, one hand on the tiller. Otherwise, the deck and the rigging are empty. Jim turns in a full circle, just to make sure he isn’t missing anything, but Mark and Selena are the only people on deck. “Where is everyone?”

“It’s just us,” Mark says, hauling another line.

“What?” The Calypso is small, but even a sloop needs a crew of more than two people. Jim looks around again, but Selena and Mark are still the only people on deck, and Mark is the only one working. Jim hasn’t seen anyone else, besides the two of them, since he came aboard. It doesn’t make sense. Since he woke up underwater, nothing has. “How?”

Mark looks back at him; then Mark glances up at Selena, at the helm. Something passes between them, some silent communication that Jim recognizes but can’t decode. Then Mark looks away. A heavy gust of wind whips across the deck, forceful enough to throw Jim off-balance. He catches himself against the railing. The wind howls around him.

In a few seconds, the sails fill. The Calypso picks up speed so rapidly that Jim can feel her movement under his feet. Jim clings to the railing, with a dire feeling of uncertainty roiling in his gut. On the other side of the deck, Mark tips his head back, grinning at the violent wind, at the sudden waves breaking against the hull.

A rope snaps loose from its mooring. Jim flinches, ducking away from it instinctively. “ Shit— ” He’s seen the damage even one loose rope can wreak, but before he can move to fix it, the rope reties itself around a different cleat, pulling the sail taught against the wind. Jim stares.

The wind begins to die down again, returning the sea to its previous calm. A beam of sunshine breaks through the cloud cover. Mark relaxes. Jim stares at him—then at Selena, who stands in the same spot at the helm, looking completely unbothered.

“You’re a druid,” Jim says, not sure who he’s talking to—but one of them has to be, to command the wind like that. Not to mention the ship herself, which—as far as Jim knows—would take another kind of magic altogether.

“Elemental,” Mark says.

“You’re—” Jim says, but Mark shakes his head.

“Not me. The captain.” He nods at Selena.

Jim looks back again, at the slight Black woman standing at the wheel. She meets his gaze, and Jim is struck by the endless dark of her eyes, like a starless summer night. Her face is soft, all rounded edges, but her eyes are sharp as flint.

“So—” Jim says. He realizes he’s staring, at the captain no less, and looks away. “It’s really just… two of you.”

“Yeah,” Selena says. “It is.”

Jim nods. He lets go of the railing, steps away, and then steps back. After a moment’s contemplation, he sits down with his back to the railing. And there he stays for the rest of the day.

⁂

Early in the evening, at eight bells, Mark goes below. He doesn’t return. Selena stays on deck as the sun bleeds yellow light across the horizon and the sky turns dark. Jim stays, too. He couldn’t sleep if he tried. His memory stitches itself back together, bit by bit, and his mind runs in endless circles as the night wears on.

“It’s a good thing you turned up in the afternoon,” Selena says, presently. Jim startles a little at the sound of her voice. He doesn’t respond, and after a minute, she goes on. “We’re both usually on deck sometime in the afternoon. I don’t know if Mark could’ve pulled you onboard all on his own.”

Her voice has a warm edge to it, the barest hint that she might be joking. Maybe that’s why, after spending several hours in silence, Jim answers. “You couldn’t’ve just… magicked me out of the water?”

Selena laughs. Jim finds himself smiling. “That’s not how it works,” Selena says.

“How does it work?”

Selena doesn’t answer. The silence stretches longer, and longer, and Jim realizes he’s crossed a line.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I shouldn’t’ve asked.”

“That’s alright,” Selena says. She sounds more guarded, maybe, but not angry. “It’s just a question.”

“Thank you,” Jim says. He means it for a lot of things.

“Sure.”

The conversation subsides after that. Selena leaves the tiller to pace across the deck, and then back again. She checks the guns. She doesn’t seem to mind Jim, sitting by the aft railing.

“We’ll be in St. John in a few days,” she says, a while later. “You can go ashore there.”

There are many things Jim could say to that. Do you want me to go ashore? he thinks, and at the same time, You’re just going to let me go? Under all of it lurks the knowledge that he owes these people, Selena and Mark—he owes them his life.

In the end, he says nothing. Selena hums an old sailor’s song, and climbs into the lower rigging to sit. Jim sits on the deck, wide awake, and looks up at the stars.

⁂