On the quiet water

Tom's eyes finally fluttered open to a world cut loose from any notion of time or place. He had no sense even of his own identity.

The glare washed everything out. Was this headache from the sun, burning down from the center of the sky? He squinted and shaded his eyes, but not enough to shut out the pain.

A white bird cut across his peripheral vision, silent.

"About time, you bloody layabout."

He craned his neck to see the silhouette of a man, a topsy-turvy shadow of a face peering down over his head.

"The pills will help, but go easy on the water."

Tom eased himself on to his elbows, and then finished sitting up. He took what looked like two Advils and a swig of water. Then a deeper swig. And he craned his neck and shielded his eyes to see who he was dealing with.

This man had splotches of graying hair fleeing from a flat-brim hat, a salt-and-pepper beard and lobster-red skin. He wore a white tee shirt, rumpled shorts and off-brand sneakers.

As Tom took another draw from the water bottle, he realized that he had the same, lobster-red skin as his benefactor. "How many fingers do you see?"

Tom shook his head. He tried to focus. Tried to speak. He gave up and waved three fingers back.

"That's good. And what day is it?"

Tom considered this for quite awhile. His tongue tried to stir the molasses in his mouth.

"Tuesday," he said at last.

"Which Tuesday?"

He felt like he was thumbing through a tiny, dust-covered calendar in the back of his brain.

"Tuesday, the seventh."

Somebody snorted.

"What month do you think this is?"

Again, his mind's eye squinted at the calendar.

"September."

Now there was a long, exasperated sigh. "You lost a lot, brother. You lost a whole lot."

________________________

Cynthia engineered most of their adventures. No, actually she engineered all of their adventures. She would read about or hear about something interesting, and the next thing Tom knew, they'd be off to do their own investigation. This would usually fill an afternoon, a day or a weekend, and they'd have a whole collection of characters, shared memories and anecdotes to enjoy. It was bonding, as if they needed to be stuck any tighter to each other.

"Did you know there are cabins and retreats all around the bay that don't have any access by land? The people boat in to town for supplies. But get this -- there are these trash boat contractors who come by once a week to haul off their garbage, and then send it to the landfill."

"No kidding?"

That was Monday. And before dawn, they were standing on a dock with a character called Jonesy from Bay Scrubbers who ferried the refuse of the rich and the poor across the bay.

"Some right nice places tucked away out here," he said as they set off in a boat that consisted of little more than an outboard motor lashed onto a corral for trash bags. "And some where the folks are as poor as snakes. But they've all got their trash, and we're ready to take it on."

Jonesy addressed most of his remarks to Cynthia. That was the usual pattern of their adventures. Sometimes Tom thought he just didn't have the poker face needed to draw out these stories. But it was probably that Cynthia was quicker on the uptake and could always think of the next question to keep the yarns spinning. And she was certainly easier on the eye for a character like Jonesy.

Things were dribbling back in patches. The last thing he could remember for sure was when they'd pulled up to a dilapidated dock, hardly more than a few pillars and rotting planks, and Jonesy hollered to bring out the trash.

"You hear me, Emin? Can't wait forever." Jonesy huffed and stepped onto the dock. "Got a schedule to keep."

Jonesy waited a moment or two, and then tramped off to the wretched little shack set off from the dock.

Tom and Cynthia exchanged glances, looked toward the shack. Some time passed. They checked their watches and exchanged glances again.

"Jesus," Cynthia said. She hopped onto the dock and headed for the shack. "Jonesy? Are we good, Jonesy?"

Tom probably didn't wait more than a minute before he followed. But he didn't shout out to anyone, only cursed to himself. And that's where his memory shut down.

________________________

And now he found himself on some kind of low-rent pontoon cruiser on the open water under an unrelenting sun. His head throbbed, his sinews drawn drum-tight, and every muscle, every synapse ached.

"Who are you? Where are we? Where's Cynthia? And Jonesy?"

"Second point first, we're safe," the geezer croaked. "That's the most important thing. We're going to get to know each other, but I'm Polaski. You can call me Polaski."

"I'm Tom."

Polaski waved, like a fly had made it out to sea to pester him. "Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like I'm surprised."

"Well, where the hell are we? What kind of boat is this? Where's the land? I can't see land."

"Last point first, it's that way," he cocked a thumb over his shoulder. "But if you look at the big picture, it's any way you want to point. So that doesn't really matter anymore, does it?

"We're about twelve miles off shore. I'd give you the coordinates, but the GPS has been acting flaky. I think the satellites are screwed.

"And you're aboard the SS Perla, named for my sainted mother. Built her myself, from my own design. We've got a good motor, but not much fuel, a sail we can rig for emergency, and we're floating some supplies and fresh water behind us." He waved at two canoes and a dinghy tethered to the rails. "What we don't have is a port of call."

"Why not?"

"Because I can't think of any damn place to go that would be any better than this."

Tom took a deep, ragged breath and ran through the possible scenarios. This might be an especially vivid nightmare. Maybe it was a reality television show and sooner or later the crew would reveal themselves. Maybe he had gone stark raving mad and he was locked up in a nice, safe padded cell somewhere. Or maybe he'd been drugged and kidnapped by this salt-crusted lunatic. None of those seemed like good options, but the last one seemed both the worst, and the most likely.

"Why don't we just head back to shore? Just do a u-turn and get out of this sun."

"No can do, mate. We'd be goners." Polaski looked sad. "Look, I know this is all sudden and everything, but you're the lucky one. You slept through the worst of it."

"What are you talking about?"

"It's just us now. Right here. Right now. They're all gone back on shore."

"Where'd they go?"

Polaski looked at him a long time, working his mouth around something. Finally, he spat over the rail. "They're gone, mate. They're all dead."

And the way he told it, he was Jonesy's partner. They'd inherited Bay Scrubbers from Jonesy's grandfather. In the early days, the company touted its rat control business with the slogan, "Keep disease at bay with Bay Scrubbers." But as more people built cottages and castles along the waters, simple trash removal became a good enough selling point on its own.

Usually Jonesy and Polaski alternated weeks on the trash pickups, but when Polaski showed up, the trash boat -- to say nothing of Jonesy himself -- was nowhere to be found.

So Polaski took a runabout along the route until he saw the trash boat tied up at Emin's pathetic little dock. He found Tom sprawled unconscious thirty yards from the cabin.

"You're a clumsy bugger aren't you?" Polaski gave him a close look.

This sounded way off topic, but Tom shrugged. "Yeah. I probably am. But--"

"That's what saved you, near as I can tell. Anyway, I drug you back to my boat, not the trash boat, but my runaround, and went back to Emin's cabin to see what was up with Jonesy. And with your girl." Polaski looked like he'd found a bitter nut in his trail mix. "You think we're just a couple of hicks, but Jonesy and me kept good records. We always knew what the other was doing."

"I didn't--"

"Shut up! You got me started and now you've got to hear it." He looked down and wiped his hands over his shorts, as if trying to smooth out the wrinkles. Then he looked up again and went on.

"It's like they'd been turned inside out, Emin and Jonesy and your girl. It was all raw, but it wasn't even raw anymore, with the bugs working it."

Polaski ran to the rail and dry heaved.

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"Not now," Polaski said, waving his hand behind him. "I can't look at it anymore now."

________________________

It didn't take long after he first woke up for Tom to realize he'd lost some serious weight. There didn't seem to be any reflective surfaces on board the SS Perla, but he could tell, all the same. The pinch test couldn't come up with any sign of a love handle. His abs were looking like something Leonardo might have sketched out if he'd been a meth addict. Just how long had he been unconscious?

He wasn't even hungry, like his stomach had shriveled down to a new comfort zone. But then again, the sour anxiety pumping through his veins might have been a bigger factor in his loss of appetite.

The sun rose. They woke up. They'd eat a little something from time to time, drink enough bottled water to stay alive and wait for the sun to go down.

In the first few days, Tom tried to pry some useful information out of Polaski, without much success.

"So, what's the plan, Skipper? We're going to sit out here and see if the sun burns us to a crisp before we run out of water?"

They both looked at the water canoe, which seemed to be bobbing more sprightly in the sea.

"Quit throwing away your empty bottles," he said.

Tom snorted. "So we don't pollute the damned ocean?"

"Just save them, from now on."

When Tom woke up the next morning, he saw a plastic tarp forming a small tent in the rear starboard corner of their pathetic deck.

Polaski came up behind him. "We can make our own water, mate."

He lifted one side of the little tent and showed Tom a ring of bowls containing seawater, with an empty bowl in the center. The plastic sheet was taut, but a pair of pliers on top made it dip directly above the empty bowl.

"Gets a mite warm in there," Polaski said. "The brine evaporates, collects on the plastic and follows the dip from the pliers to drip into the clean bowl. Bob's your uncle, fresh water!"

Tom gave him the side-eye as he weighed his options, and wondered what day it was now.

"We can collect fresh water when it rains, too."

That was a little too much.

"Look, Skipper, I'm no sailor, but even I know that a pontoon boat is a disaster waiting to happen on the open sea. If we get a three-foot wave, this whole thing is flipping upside down. If we get a storm, it's game-over. What do we do, catch a ride on a dolphin?"

"The sea is calm," Polaski said, spreading his arms. "You should be, too."

________________________

Tom's nightmares were set to a random playlist. He never knew what order they would take, but before he woke up he could count on all the greatest hits showing up. There was the desert dream, where he crawled towards an oasis -- or was that a mirage? There was the ocean dream, where he was doomed to tread water forever, while he felt the back wash of some leviathan coursing beneath him. There was the nut house dream, where he was the doctor but the patients treated him as if he were insane.

And no night was complete before the inside-out bodies dream, where everyone around the bay seemed to have swallowed a live grenade.

________________________

Polaski was able to fill a few empty water bottles, but they were still cutting into their supplies. Neither of them ate much, but the food stockpiles dwindled, too.

"We're going to die aren't we?"

"We can catch some fish."

"With what for bait?"

Polaski pulled a gleaming, eight-inch knife from its sheath. "How many of those fingers do you actually use?" he asked.

Even through his sunburn, Tom looked pale.

"Jesus, mate! I'm just funnin' ya. We had to get out fast, so please excuse the lack of fucking luxuries."

________________________

"Hey, Skipper!"

Tom waited for Polaski to turn and come closer to him.

"What really happened to Cynthia back there? And to your buddy, for that matter?"

"Told you, mate. It's like they were all turned inside-out."

"And that sounds like bullshit. Did you kill them and we're hiding out in the middle of the damn ocean? Or are you just in loo-loo la-la land?"

The trouble -- one of the troubles -- with Polaski was that he had the perfect poker face. No matter what, he'd just look back at you with that blank, burnt face. You could scream at him and wave your arms, invoking God or Satan, and it was all the same. Grab him by the throat and shake him. It's all the same.

"You done, mate?"

But he finally told some more of the story.

"I don't scare easy, but I've got to tell you, this one flipped the switch." Polaski shook his head slowly, taking deep breaths. "I hauled you back to the office, and I was going to call it in, but the TV was on. We just let the TV run all the time at the office, whether anyone was there or not. Simpler that way.

"But these guys were coming on saying this was some new disease, or biological warfare, or Bible verse. I mean what the hell? They didn't know and neither did I. But it sounded like anyone who breathed this stuff in was headed for hamburger heaven in the fast lane.

"I'm flipping channels to get off the comedy shows, right? And on the local news, the main guy, his assistant and the weatherman go pop-pop-pop just like that. On camera. I puked right there. Everyone was getting this thing and most of them died. By now I reckon all of them died."

Tom's eyes had been wide before Polaski started. Now he felt like they were about to pop, too.

Polaski went on about how he threw together some emergency supplies and got the hell out of there with the pontoon boat and its make-shift cargo carriers. For a couple days, the AM/FM radio brought bad, bad news, and then that petered out, too.

"If I'd had time, I might have gotten a better kit together, but here we are, cozy as you please."

"I don't believe a word of it," Tom said. "You're out of your mind."

"Easy, mate. I saved your life, you know."

"So now you own it? How about you just go back and drop me off where you found me and I'll take my chances from there. Even steven.

"Or we can just kick up our heels on a thirty-foot death trap until the sea swallows us up or the sun burns us to a crisp or we starve or die of thirst? Want to lay a bet on how it all turns out?"

Polaski's poker face looked back at him, his lobster-red skin slowly turning to leather.

________________________

Tom was in the middle of the inside-out bodies dream when his eyes sprang open. He didn't move. There was no moon, and the stars seemed brighter than he'd ever seen them. In the beginning, Polaski had said they were twelve miles out. But how far had they drifted since then, and in which direction? There were so many questions but the only thing he knew for certain was that he had to do something, anything.

He stared at the sky for a long time before he stood and walked barefoot next to the Skipper. Neither of them had anywhere to stow anything, and by this time there were no secrets -- well, none about physical things, anyway.

In the starlight, he saw Polaski's knife, drew it slowly from its sheath and tested its sharpness against his thumb. He stood tall and took a deep breath, and another. He took twenty, thirty breaths, as if his lungs had never been filled before. And his right arm described slow, broad arcs, growing ever quicker and more precise before he crouched over Polaski's head.

He held his breath as he grabbed Polaski's chin and made a single, deep slash across his throat. Polaski cried out and waved his arms, but Tom easily jumped out of reach. He circled around the thrashing body and plunged the knife deep into what he took for Polaski's heart.

Pretty soon the boat was as quiet as the stars.

________________________

Come sunrise, he retrieved the knife and washed it in seawater. He couldn't get the pontoon boat's motor to fire up, so he loaded some water and food into the dinghy. But he couldn't get its little outboard started either.

So he took the oars and set off in the direction he imagined would bring him to land. And he would just see what kind of monsters he would find there.