The front deck crumpled like a cheap sedan. Ben was awakened in midair, with no time to boot up his mind before he slammed into the front of the console. His ribs were the first thing to feel the pain.
“CRAB?!”
“We hit ice.”
“It was eighty degrees when I went to sleep!”
It was no longer eighty degrees. A hard, frosty wind blew through the busted bridge window. Ben stood and saw the iceberg jutting out overhead, a floating tower of blue cliff faces, with just enough melt along the bottom to keep the ice from puncturing the rubber skirt of the hovercraft. But the engine had died on impact and the skirt was starting to deflate. She wouldn’t stay afloat for much longer.
The cliff of the berg hung over the wreck, raining melt down onto the main deck in fat, heavy drops. It was like standing under a wet tree and then shaking it. There was no possible way to scale the side of the thing. Surrounding it was a loose, dangerous pack of ice: random polygons bunched together and swirling around. There was no solid land of any kind. The berg itself was a massive edifice of wiper-fluid blue glacier. The hovercraft looked like an ant compared to it.
Ben could feel the craft settling down into the water, the air whistling out of the bottom.
“The lifeboats,” he said to Crab. Crab jumped off the console and down the stairs. Ben grabbed his phone and the charger then rushed back to the stateroom, where he had dumped his belongings. He grabbed his backpack and stuffed it with two robes, four towels, and two washcloths. It all fit. Then he opened up a stand-alone closet and, to his shock, found it stocked with cold-weather gear: boots, wool socks, thermal underwear, sweaters, gloves, hats, crampons, ice axes, goggles, Gore-Tex pants, and a weatherproof shell jacket. All clean. All his size. None of it had been there the day before. He took everything, along with a nearby pen and blank notepad from a nightstand.
Outside the porthole, he could see the frigid ocean rising. He got dressed in the gear as fast as he could, ran back up to the main cabin, and dumped an entire bowl of wrapped saltines into the bag, plus a dozen extra bottles of water. Then he ducked through the double doors.
The craft was succumbing now, listing forward, with water rushing up the limp skirt and into the crushed front end of the hull. Off the starboard side of the deck, toward the stern, Crab pushed a button that automatically hoisted up one of the orange fiberglass lifeboats. The stubby vessel dangled from its davits over the edge of the ship, waiting to drop. The hovercraft was tilting starboard as well, turning into the berg, eager to smash back into it on its way down.
“Hurry the fuck up!” Crab yelled as Ben ran over and popped the lifeboat hatch. The water was creeping up the tanning deck, sweeping the lounge chairs back and gushing through the tears in the fiberglass. Ben jumped through the hatch and found himself inside a diesel-powered rescue boat designed to hold twenty-four people, with a rudimentary cockpit sticking up at the stern. Ben examined the ceiling and found a large red pull tab with a RELEASE label.
He gave it a yank and the boat came free from the davits, dropping barely an inch into the surf.
“We gotta hurry,” Ben told Crab. The sinking craft was still turning back into the berg, with the lifeboat sandwiched between the two. Inside the cockpit he found the thick plastic key to gun the engine. He turned it and pushed the throttle back to get away from the wreckage.
“Can you see the path?” he asked Crab.
“What fucking path? It’s an ice field.”
“The path continues somewhere. Look for it!”
Crab perched on the cockpit’s windowsill. This boat didn’t offer the same kind of sweeping, majestic view as its mother ship.
“There’s ice every goddamn place. The pack must have closed around us,” Crab said.
The lifeboat slammed into one of the flat polygons of the surrounding mass and Ben tumbled down the cockpit stairs into the cabin. He was a rag doll at this point. He had to train himself to be a six-year-old again, all rubbery bones and fearlessness. Crab shot back up the side of the cockpit tower and glanced out the side porthole.
“Are we sunk?” Ben asked.
“No, but the good boat is. Too bad. That was a much better boat.”
Ben dragged himself back up the stairs and looked out to see the sleek yacht surrendering to the churning water. The waves reached the bridge of the mother ship and poured through the broken windowpane, gradually swallowing the craft whole, a snake unhinging its jaws for a big meal.
Meanwhile, the lifeboat had taken a blow, but its engine was still humming. Ben moved the throttle back to idle and gave the hovercraft a final salute as it went down, down, down . . . and then gone. Past the site of the wreck was a tiny opening between the berg and the rest of the pack, enough for an experienced mariner to circumnavigate.
Ben was not an experienced mariner. He piloted a Sunfish in summer camp when he was a kid, one of those sailboats that had a little chrome handle at the bow so you could drag the hull into the water. It didn’t even have a sitting area. You had to lie on top of the thing and pray you didn’t fall off. And you had to stick a daggerboard right through its heart, then steer it with a crappy wooden rudder at the back. Ben was terrible at every last possible task aboard. His knots always came undone. The daggerboard would get stuck. Whenever the boat had to come about, he would get nailed in the face with the swinging boom. He was not a mariner. He could swim, though. If you can’t sail, you better be good at swimming.
There was a radio mounted to the cockpit dash. Ben grabbed the receiver and turned the knobs every which way, switching channels and shouting out distress signals. The compass on the dashboard spun endlessly, refusing to give a clear direction.
“Mayday! Mayday! Can anyone hear us?!”
After the radio crackled and buzzed for a bit, there was an answer.
“Hello?” It was a female voice.
“MAYDAY! MAYDAY! We’re stuck in the ice pack!”
“Well, that sounds bad.”
“This is an emergency. PLEASE HELP. The compass and coordinate measurements on this panel are all screwy. I have no idea where I am.”
“Aw, you sound sweet.”
“Can you help us?!”
“Oh, sure. What the hey. Just head around the iceberg and the path should open back up.”
“Who is this?”
“I’ll see you on the other side. Can’t wait to meet you! Later!”
The radio went dead. Ben eased the throttle forward and moved carefully around the floating monolith.
“Pop the hatch,” Crab said.
“Why?”
“So I can fucking see! I’m a crab. I gotta get close to stuff to see well.”
He pulled the release and Crab jumped off the cockpit roof and down into the water. The wind came roaring through the hatch and unloaded a flurry of jabs on Ben’s face. Crab quickly resurfaced and climbed back inside.
“Is there more ice below the surface?” Ben asked Crab.
“You’re good. The berg retreats underwater. It doesn’t stick out.”
“Can you close that hatch back up? It’s freezing in here.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I shouldn’t have to remind you that I’m a crab.”
“Right.”
Ben walked down the steps and pulled the hatch closed. They were making slow progress around the berg now. It must have been over two miles wide, its own island. And it was gorgeous: a living slab of frozen history, moving, sweating, its facets shifting from every possible vantage point. It had presence. Photos of it were worthless in conveying its awesomeness. It was more beautiful than any object Ben had ever seen.
The surrounding pack kept threatening to close in on them, but there remained just enough room for the orange lifeboat to safely pass through. Ben tried the radio again.
“Hello?”
The female voice came back on. “Hey! You’re doing great!”
“You can see us?”
“No, but you’re not dead. That’s pretty impressive. Keep going, you superstar, you.”
The voice clicked off.
“That chica’s kinda flirting with you,” said Crab.
“Shut up.”
“She might be cute.”
“I’m not really interested in that right now, Crab.”
“Yeah, but you could sure use it. And she might know some lady crabs.”
“Shut up.”
As they wended their way around the berg, the sun came into view, blasting down on the walls of the floating mountain and the surrounding ice patches. It was right on top of them now. Blinding. It felt as if they were surrounded by suns. Even with his goggles on, it took Ben a few moments to recover. Stretching in front of them was a clear path straight through the ice field. No sign of land anywhere.
He gunned the throttle. Then he kept one hand on the wheel and used his free hand to open up his backpack and take out a loaf of bread. He ate every last crumb. No other accompaniments. Then he took out the pad and pen and ripped the pen cap off with his teeth. He put the pad on the dash and began scrawling out a note to Teresa. He wasn’t a great writer. The copy guys his bosses hired to write brochures were all more lively and persuasive. Ben was the money guy. The hammer. He figured out long ago that when he met with vendors face-to-face, he could knock down their prices by an extra 10 percent. His scar did all the bargaining for him.
He never wrote Teresa when he was on the road. It was always just a few phone calls—always short, always down to business. And that would be it. He should have written to her more—long, florid love letters, like a Civil War soldier to his beloved. Something she could keep in a box somewhere. Something that had meaning, well beyond just a phone call asking if she needed some shit from the store on his way back. They were both great at the day-to-day business of love. They helped each other. They planned. One was calm when the other was pissed off, and vice versa. They were good like that.
But they were both too old and busy and tired for grand romantic gestures anymore. If he never got home, there would be no box of letters for her to remember him. There would only be pitted-out T-shirts and half-eaten bags of pork rinds.
Dear Teresa,
I love you so much. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be home soon.
Love,
Ben
Crab walked up Ben’s shoulder and peered at the note.
“What’cha writing?”
“None of your business,” Ben said.
“Sorry.”
He took out a water bottle and emptied it. Then he stuffed the note inside the bottle and tossed it through the hatch and into the sea.
The radio crackled again.
“Hello?” the female voice said. Ben grabbed the receiver.
“Hello.”
“You’re almost here. That’s really great.”
“Are you the Producer?”
“The who? I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Where are you?”
“Look ahead.”
Ben looked out the windshield and saw it: a jagged, snowcapped mountain peak in the distance. Not ice. Real land.
“Nice, isn’t it?” said the voice. “Hurry up. Get here soon.”
“Why?”
“So I can kill you, silly! Ta!”
And the radio shut off.
“Well, I guess she wasn’t flirting with you,” Crab said.