145
Alone, Mitchell lay quietly hour after hour through the long summer days. He stretched or read or watched clouds passing beyond the wrens that hopped across the latticework above the patio. He knew now that boredom was the inability to cope with the moment. Loneliness, too. Sages and poets are great because they cherish their solitude and find wisdom in its exploration. They leave their journals to mark those paths. Mitchell had read them knowing he needed their advice and their cautions. Still I’m scarred head to foot he thought. And he did yearn, sometimes terribly, for a place to rest, someplace where solitude was chosen rather than imposed.
What is it about the sea? Why am I most alive in the rising and falling of those wild distances? In the breadth of a rolling blue morning? Why do I ache for it?
He turned onto his side and tried to sleep but his mind pitched then rolled, pitched then rolled, a sailor’s tread, rising and falling through flashes of copper-gold light. Evening already? So soon? It was the only thing sure to come. Well I haven’t lived by halves he thought. And yes, I am consoling myself but I have paid the price and wouldn’t trade it. Julia laughing in a hundred different ways. The touch of her eyes, her smile. Her heart. The magic.
Russell sitting on a freshly cut stump up on the slope. His oil-stained thread-worn hat pushed back. His hands in his pockets, mouth skewed up in thoughtfulness. Never beguiled, always fair. That something in his eyes. The knowing.
And Everett, of course, unafraid and laughing. The others like him, the men on deck. Mitchell remembered his name called or spoken and handshakes and claps on the back and the strong assurance of their glances. So many of them ripped to pieces...
Mitchell had dragged Tony Gardiner out of the bombs on deck and sat cradling him under a winch platform while Tony’s life dissolved. His broken arms were twisted at Mitchell’s shirt front, his pelvis and legs were crushed. Pain shook his body, blood pulsed from his mouth. Mitchell wanted to push aside the matted curls dripping blood and sweat onto Tony’s forehead but his hand was fouled with bloodied feces. "I have you, Tony. It’s okay, I have you." Tony’s hands went limp. His eyes were open. Mitchell looked away through his own tears at the purity of the surrounding sea. He saw the war and the ship and its intention and he knew then it was deception and murder. He saw the timeless disguise of the evil that employed him and he went outward from himself into the sea’s sanctity. The dead man in his arms was the weight of his own realization.
The crew reached them when the rogue bombs were thrown overboard and the decks cleared. Gardiner was placed in a body bag and carried to the freezer hold. Mitchell was in shock. The Chief and Steve and Armand walked him to sickbay. They showered him then laid him in his bunk.
"It’s all we can do," Mitchell remembered the Chief saying. "We’re in a bad spot here. Do you hear me, Mitchell. Mitchell, listen to me. Saving each other is all we can do."
Mitchell slept for two days, waking only to shift his posture and knowing too many shipmates had died. Echoes of their dying was the price he would pay...
The years and years of weariness, so long running from the claws of guilt. Nerves spent and finally the confrontation. No drug, no whiskey, not even a cigarette. Incoherent ravings in tortured semi-consciousness. He had hung on to the mattress sides while screams tore out of his skull. Their screams, his screams, and the babbled promises to something other than himself. Days and nights for weeks he craved alcohol sleep and opium dreams. Doubt stalked him. He wondered if his words were real. If anything inside him was real.
Then resolve, the unexpected power of it. For the first time in his life, the secret knowing that only he could betray or fulfill himself. Months. A year. The voice of his guilt came again. "Take me," he said to it. "Take me, you motherfucker. Try."