Stock-still (Short Story of a Cruise ship in the Drake)

Stock-still
(Aboard a cruise ship in the Waters of the Drake)





It is not far from the truth had I changed instinct for reason in my youthful days that I’d be long dead now. Yes, indeed, instinct, the natural gift of animals living within nature. For often I have been benumbed and humbled by the functions of the mysterious, and at times hardly able to move, and have survived all ordeals, yet this one time—I dare say, I was baffled—and that being a mild description of my emotions, I was literary shocked—

I unbolted my cabin window to see what the disturbance was, “Rope. Get a rope!” a voice in the darkness said, as if someone was losing their strength. Satisfied I had heard correctly I moved forward by this time, and the moaning sounds I had heard along with the cry for help, had faded sufficiently, to a less clearer quality, tone or tenor. As I looked out the window, downward, I saw a shadow shaking and quivering—piteously.
In a pleading voice—the shadow, that had a shape of a person, that looked ghostly—a voice almost piercing in helplessness, which somehow didn’t go straight to my heart, and affected me weirdly, still perhaps half asleep, I said “A rope, okay, I’ll get a rope…” all the time assuming I was in a dream, if not a nightmare, thus finding myself—in spite of the dream, or nightmare—hurrying out of the cabin to the deck area, near in a run, behind me my wife calling, “Wait, stop a minute, you’re having nightmare!”
“Where’s some rope,” I said to her, in near panic, grabbing a lifejacket instead and rushing to the edge of the ship.
“No, no!” yelled my wife, and I stopped ‘stock-still!’ instinctively.
Now catching her breath, and composure she grabbed me, pulled me back, my right foot over the edge of the ship, the Drake below me and 6000-meters deep of water. She was in a frightful fit, shivering in the October atmosphere. How heavy the atmosphere was with wet dampness, I just came to notice, a light rain, lit by the night lamp, called the moon and lights of the ship—I felt as if isolated at the end, and edge of the world, all around me water, it surrounded me, as I exhaled the intoxicating numbness, silently coming out of a fog, looking overboard for my phantom.
“You were dreaming,” my wife told me, now fully awake, or seemingly so. Perhaps it was some kind of manifestation, I told my mind, but my mind wouldn’t accept it. I now took it to be, reason over instinct. Why not I said, it’s seldom I make such choices.

When I got back to my room, half naked, I became horribly cold, and my teeth chattered from the wet, I felt very awkward, I was thus, shutting the window, little by little my teeth stopped chattering, the warmth of the cabin—stole through me, and the influence of the quiet, humming of the ship, and my exhaustion put me to sleep as it all surrounded me, wrapped me in its shawl.

When we arrived in Punta Arenas the next day, at 11:40 a.m., the sister ship to ours was already docked. A group of people were standing about talking, and looking quite serious. I suppose I am a practical man, so at any rate, my wife and I, went and asked what all the commotion was about, and one of the staff members, said—reluctantly, with stumbling words, “We’re one passenger short.”


Written October, 5, 2010 (No: 689) bs