FIVE HUNDRED MILES away, also damp, a dim light, projecting the shape and yellowish hue of a dying moon, illuminates a slick floor. Then it flickers, and dies.
The thin man smacks the cool cylinder against his palm. The flashlight returns to its half-life. “Friggin’ thing.”
He takes two more steps, then slides his heavy boots on the metal, imagining himself skating, breaking the monotony of the chore. He raises the angle of the light, looking at the edges of the boxes and huge containers, the mountains of white rice, cell phone screens, car batteries, undershirts, kids’ pajamas, who knows what myriad of stuff piled high to the distant ceiling of this cavernous belly.
He looks up into blackness that, he imagines, could stretch to infinity. He thinks: I should have asked her to marry me. I should have, I should have. Now she thinks I’m on the fence. He pictures her sitting in a café in Hong Kong doing those tortuous emotional somersaults she can do, capable of deciding on an impulse to call off the whole relationship.
And he can’t call. His cell phone hasn’t worked in two days, the signal apparently unable to find a satellite in the vastness of sea. Or maybe it’s the weather. Even in the hull, surrounded by mountains of boxes, he can hear the crashing and lashing of waves.
He looks back down, scoots along the narrow path, flashlight lit, thinking of her, looking at nothing. He sees the pants. Not pants, he realizes, legs with pants. A pair of legs jutting into the path, extruding from between huge containers. Give me a break, he thinks.
“Bryan.”
The legs remain motionless. He sighs.
Louder: “Yo, Bryan.”
Of the handful of shipmates on the skeleton crew, it’s the sarcastic and confrontational Filipino called Bryan who is most likely to have drunk himself into a stupor. The thin man uses his right foot to nudge a leg.
The body rouses.
“They’re gonna be pissed if they catch you down there.”
The thin man wants to keep it as neutral as possible, not be seen as a cop or do anything to make an enemy if they’ve got to spend another half week together at sea.
The legs bend, then the body starts to rise in the dark between the cold metal containers. In an unintentionally synchronized fashion, the thin man raises the flashlight, illuminating the tall figure wearing a long black peacoat and sporting a beard in full blossom.
“I fell asleep,” the bearded man says. He sounds surprised.
It’s not Bryan, the thin man realizes, not anyone he recognizes. Jesus, a friggin’ stowaway. Even as he thinks it, he’s transfixed by the beard. As much as it is full and wild, it looks deliberate, like something that would’ve been fashionable in some distant biblical era.
As neutrally as possible, the thin man says: “Come on with me. We have hot showers upstairs.” He wants to get this guy to the captain without a fuss, keep things simple.
The bearded man looks behind him, into the near-black crevice between the containers. He makes out the outlines of the backpack, the tattered brand-name knockoff bearing an otherworldly treasure, given him in a wordless exchange in an alley in Morocco. He was surprised that so much divine power and truth could be so light.
He turns back to find the flashlight upturned at his face. The bearded man closes his eyes, listens for other voices or footsteps. Hears none. He looks at the rail standing before him, a pasty, Earthy shell of flesh and bones. But a human being, a spark of life.
The bearded man mutters something.
“I can’t understand you. Bring your things. You can take them with you upstairs.”
The bearded man takes a slow breath, processing the inevitability of the logic, the undeniable rationale. After years of modest duty, he has been summoned, like his brethren, for divine purpose. It can only be that there is a gravest threat. As a Guardian of the City, he cannot doubt. His is a life of faith. He must act with purpose. Without reservation.
There is a flash of movement and the thin man feels himself turned, lifted. He feels intense pressure on his neck. He thinks: I should have asked her to marry me.
The flashlight drops to the floor.
“I said: ‘God forgive me.’”