Tours of the Black Clock

144

WE LIVE IN THE cargo hold of the ship the entire voyage. It seems like a much longer voyage than the one that brought me over thirty years ago. It seems as though the sea’s become much wider or the world more distant from itself, or perhaps it’s that home, or anything resembling home, must, in my return to it, seem more unapproachable. Maybe it’s just from living down in the cargo hold where there’s no night or day. At first I’m afraid Z’s not going to survive the voyage, but the cargo hold is quite warm, one of the boat’s engines is just behind the next wall, and the food is better than the bread and coffee we’ve been living on in Nice for eight months. The old man doesn’t get seasick either; he lives below the watermark of nausea. His own watermark, I mean. He’s still among the living, or some kind of living anyway, the April night the captain calls me up on deck to point out, across the Caribbean before us, the harsh shores of the Yucatan.