Sleepless Sailor

The sound was horrid. A gritty and methodic pang echoed through the space accompanied by the nauseating spin of neon lights. At least, they all were supposed to spin, yet the bulb in the far corner no longer rotated and swallowed only half of the room in a stark red. I remember talking to a sailor, Catcher, about its maintenance check. I had to escort him into the female berthing, after all. During the test of the emergency system, it was discovered that a wire was pinched under the reflector and to make a simple fix worse, the light fixture was practically glued to the ceiling due to rusted iron screws, the incorrect screws for a seafaring vessel. Catcher shrugged and made a statement that inevitably, he would drill out the rusted components and correct the fixture. I suppose he never did.

Now, after two pangs of the alarm, my mind translated the meaning; the collision alarm. My veins reactively filled with adrenaline, but my body didn’t move. I still lay in my rack, head crooked to the side to see the light that no longer spins. In my defense, sleep and I had been unfamiliar for the past 31 hours.

Earlier during a routine check of the starboard MK25 machine gun, I found the newest member of the division, Wyatt, pale in the face. He was spitting and stuttering to explain why our most recently upgraded gun was jammed in the ammunition chute. Reyes, a more senior sailor, stood off to the side with her face in her grease covered hands. From another’s point of view, she looked on the brink of a panic attack, hiding her face and breathing deep, clipping breaths. Nevertheless, I knew her and I knew her well. That body posture was containment of a blinding rage. I found myself almost laughing as I swore I saw steam come from the sweat of her collar. Wyatt made a simple mistake that most of us do in the beginning. Loading with a gap in the rounds that leads to a catch inside the chamber. One Reyes had made which is why I believed, although poorly, she attempted to hide her anger. She knew the consequence. So, just as I had spent 36 hours working through the portside gun a time ago with Reyes, I spent 31 more hours with the two of them, allowing Wyatt to take the lead and correct his mistake.

My exhaustion was debilitating to say the least. Now a collision was imminent and within a moment more, a monstrous sound of gargling metal and a prolonged steely screech sounded as something rammed into the portside of the ship. The impact would have thrown me to the deck if it wasn’t for the hurricane straps preventing my fall. I wish I could have been in a fritz about it. I knew to leap from the top rack and scale up the ladderwells, making it to the safety of the life rafts. After all, it wasn’t long after the sound of the hull unzipping did the announcement to abandon ship echo through the berthing.

However, my curtains stayed shut. My body fell back into a normal, sleepy rhythm and the sound of thumping boots and exasperated voices fell deaf on my ears. I merely thought about the portside gun. The first long night of my career leading to unspoken feelings for Reyes. In our attempts to put the thing back together, we left a large scar on the inside of the cradle to which we, at the time younger sailors, carved into it our initials. To this day, we both carry the pocket knives with chipped points and dull edges at our secret whittling job. I felt the folded knife in my palm still, fingers fiddling with it under my blanket. Did the impact knock it loose and plummet the gun hundreds of nautical miles below us? If the gun was ever recovered, would our initials still be engraved or be eaten away by rust?

Realistically, those thoughts should not have been my current concern, but it caused me a twinge in my chest. This 500ft long tin can of steel and alloy felt a part of me. When my feet meet the shore, I found myself lost to it all. My family was too inland to have them around. My fiancée of five years left me without a word. I was merely met with just a ring left on the dining room table after a three month underway. My house was quiet since she took the dog, and civilian friends were hard to come by in adult life. Especially one where constant communication is key to which there is little to none in the middle of the sea. I found I did not know who I was without the uniform and the sailors around me. The fast paced life I grew to enjoy and the success of understanding the way the wires rooted throughout the ship; how the roar of the gas turbines were a distorted heartbeat; that the hum of the ventilation was how she breathed. That all might be at its end.

I thought of the fan room covered in painter’s tape because tomorrow we were going to paint it fresh. I thought of the electrical tags ready to be signed and hung so maintenance could be done on the magazine sprinklers. I thought of the results coming out soon and how much I hoped Wyatt advanced his rank and that in two days, we all knew, the galley would serve pizza. I thought about how Catcher probably forgot about the degraded red light and he will never get a chance to fix it. Now as my life on shore, my life at sea seemed to be under threat. My expectations and plans and complaints all seemed unimportant if it wasn’t on this ship. I thought of Reyes on a lookout watch and how I stayed up with her late into the night until the stars were at their brightest. Unencumbered by the clouds and pollution of the cities. I thought of her dress at the Christmas party and how my suit jacket accidentally matched the color she chose. I thought of her coming to my rescue when my truck broke down off the pier and she was smart enough to have jumper cables in her more reliable Corolla. I thought of the portside gun sinking to the bottom of the ocean with our initials and how my tongue dried in every attempt to tell her since.

So I lay in my rack, listening to how the ship no longer breathed, no rattle from her heart. I closed my eyes to the flickering red lights as water finally found its way into the electrical. I listened to the sloshing sound of water finally pouring into the berthing. I’d guess it has engulfed all the bottom racks at this point, painstakingly climbing to the middle rack. I wished for the peace of unconsciousness. To allow my body to finally fall into a slumber. To let the salt fill my lungs and cold water preserve my skin as I’d imagine my name would find its way on a military placate somewhere. To be entombed by the only place I felt like I had any belonging. The ship is sinking, yet I can’t sleep.

I hadn’t noticed the toss of the ship left my hand partly exposed through the curtains until a hand laced their fingers with mine. My first thought, although foolish, was that some angel or deity of death had accepted my plea, but their skin didn’t have an ethereal feel. The flesh was cool, damp, with the slick texture of someone who had attempted to wash off grease, but the substance never completely washed off. My eyes opened to my now parted curtain and outside stood wide eyes. Reyes’s eyes. Her jaw agape, tongue twisting behind her teeth, but her warm, blown out eyes were held by a shaking frame. Either sweat or sea water dabbled her face, streaks falling from the soak of her hairline. I knew she wanted to say something, anything, maybe everything, but it was all too tightly wound in her mind. My choked voice broke through the groans of metal and the swashing of flooding water.

“I’m tired.”

“Not yet.” She said.

Those words cracked open a barrage of urgency as an overflow of memories scorched my brain. She had said that when I was half asleep on her shoulder, holding the barrel of the MK25 while her hands struggled to get the firing pin to set. She had said that to me late one night while I was standing my watch in the combat center when she found me dozing off under the blue lights. She said that to me, kicking the pallet I was sleeping on, waiting to set up the gun range on the flight deck. She said that to me, under the street lamps as she drove around with me all night. The night I discovered my partner had left me and I called her in a drunken stupor. A stupor that made me crave the taste of brass.

My eyes welled with tears as I allowed her to pull me from the rack and plummet into waist high water. Reyes did most of the fighting as she heaved my lumbering nerve-sinched body. I focused on the messy bun on the back of her head. Soaked in the musky, sulphuric stench of ocean brine, I watched as droplets fell down the nape of her neck. All I could feel was the lure of her pulling my arm and dragging my feet mindlessly out of the water and up the ladderwells. I barely noticed how my body instinctively shook from the frigid stick of my drenched clothes. Topside of the ship showed how the forecastle met the waterline and life rafts waited patiently for the Coast guard ship to meet close enough to pull each sailor up. I struggled to swim with one hand, but my other was occupied by the numbing grip of Reyes’ as she fought to stay above water and also wave the closest boat. I couldn’t help but notice that right above the water on the portside, that same gun was still tightly fixated to its mount.

It wasn’t long before I sat on the back of a rescue boat, towel on Reyes’ and I’s shoulders, watching the flag of our ship be ingested by a merciless ocean. Further past the flagpole, a massive cargo ship floated with an ugly wound on its starboard side. My teeth gritted at the sight. It still lazily float, parading around a wound that slaughtered my boat and subsequently, took a chunk of me with it. Part of me was lost with that ship, but as I glanced down to the striped bruising on my hand, a sense of serenity found me. A now adrenaline exhausted Reyes rested her head on my shoulder. I do not know myself past this point, but as I glance to Reyes, the woman with my life twice under her belt, the desire hits me. I want to know. This version of me that she seems to see in me. I’m tired and I can’t sleep, but it’s just not my time to sleep. Not yet, anyways.