Zooplankton
When thinking of those stranded at sea, it is not difficult to conceive of the consequences hunger and thirst will have on the body. Such things are predictable. Without food and water, the body will wither away and die, although I could never have imagined the extent of those forces without having actually experienced them. What is often more difficult for the uninitiated to envision are the damaging effects of the sun and saltwater. How the rays of the former render one’s skin into a red, craggy leather, encrusted with boils. How the brine of the latter stings your eyes and corrodes your flesh like acid. Needless to say, the amalgamation of all these factors induces truly terrifying reactions in the human psyche. But more terrifying than that is how easy it is for some to adapt to those circumstances. Some cling to life via a single desire: survival at any cost.
I had shipped out two months ago with the commercial fishing vessel, Valparaíso, to ply my craft as a marine biologist, measuring fish population metrics. The captain wasn’t very keen on letting me aboard, and I’d had to fight for my berth. I wish now that he had been more convincing.
She’d gone down in a bad storm three weeks ago. Of course, the life raft was outdated, lacking a canopy and many of the survival tools required of most modern life rafts.
“We were trying to cut down on costs,” explained the captain, back when he was still lucid. The thing was essentially a large, neon orange octagon, offering no shelter whatsoever, but doing just enough to keep us afloat. During the day, the sunlight reflected off the raft, so that you were blinded no matter where you looked. I had resolved that orange was to be my least favorite color from that day forward.
We had once been six. Davy threw himself overboard just three days in. Swam as far down into the ocean as he could. The prospect of drinking your own urine and starving to death hadn’t seemed all that appealing to him, we supposed. No one was willing to jump in after him. A week later, in the dead of night, we awoke to find Erik pilfering what he could of the food and water supply, eating and drinking as fast as he could. I shuffled to the other side of the raft while the others beat him bloody and threw his unconscious body into the water. That left me, Sergo (one of the meat processors), Raymond (an engineer), and Captain Valdez. The situation was becoming truly bleak. We ran out of food two days ago. All that was left was a survival knife, a tiny propane camping stove, a flare gun, and two canteens of water between the four of us. The sun beat down relentlessly as we sprawled out miserably around the craft. There was nothing to do but try and shield our bodies and eyes from the blazing sun.
A familiar Russian accent pierced the silence, “Doctor, what lives out here?”
“Sergo, I really wish you wouldn’t call me that. I never got my doctorate. Just call me Matt. And I am certainly not trained to provide you with any medical advice,” I replied without opening my eyes. “If I’m right, we’re in the middle of the open ocean in the Pacific. That means the oxygen levels around us are so low that very few things can survive out here, outside of some microscopic organisms, like zooplankton. I doubt you’ll find anything living that you can see, never mind eat.”
“This is what I thought. So it is safe to say that this does not look good.”
“No shit, you stupid Ruski. You know, you might just be the first Russian Sherlock Holmes,” spat Raymond. He’d been deconstructing the small propane stove and putting it back together to keep his mind occupied. Sergo had tried to get him to stop, in case we ever needed it, but Raymond angrily refused. The engineer had grown rather restless these last few days. There were no engines on the life raft, after all.
“Let’s see how the captain’s doing,” he said, hopefully.
None of us were in great shape after three weeks adrift, but Captain Valdez was by far the worst off. He’d been having seizures, probably as a result of dehydration. The starvation had hit him the hardest, too. Already in his fifties or sixties, he’d been reduced to a living skeleton. We’d draped his coat over him to protect him from the sun. His white officer’s cap slid down to cover his forehead and eyes, revealing his matted gray hair. Despite everything, it seemed almost pristine. The cap itself was rigid, the white fabric was stainless, the black lid polished to a mirror sheen. The embroidery in the shape of an anchor and laurel wreath shone with a lustrous golden glow. It crowned his head with an air of authority, elevating the otherwise incapacitated, emaciated husk of the man that lay before us. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Sergo looking at the cap, too. He seemed entranced, reached his hand out towards it, realized what he was doing, and retracted it.
Raymond begged for some direction: “Captain, what should we do?”
“Gurh. Geh,” decreed the captain.
“What?”
“Ehh? Mrr. Eugh,” clarified the captain.
Raymond looked down, dejectedly. He grabbed one of the canteens to give the captain a drink, but before the canister could touch his lips, Sergo barred him with a quick extension of his meaty arm. Raymond scowled at him, irritated and confused. I tried to force words from my dry throat.
“What are you doing?”
“Do not give this man our water,” advised Sergo. “He is beyond our help. It will prove a waste.”
“I know your people are cold, you frigid Russian son of a bitch,” Raymond ranted, “but I am not about to withhold a sip of water from an ailing man, no less the man with more sea experience than any of us combined!”
I braced for an angry response from Sergo, but none came.
“Let me spin you story, comrades. Under Stalin regime, my father was arrested and sent to Siberian Gulag. As you might imagine, Siberia is a cold place. Cold even for Russians, Raymond. When you are in a place like this, experience is of no consequence. Everyone experiences the same. The guards are cruel. There is little food. It is cold. These things are true, whether you spend five minutes in Gulag or twenty years in Gulag. You see, this is very similar situation. The sun and sea are cruel. There is nothing to eat and little to drink. It is hot. These things are true, whether you are captain of ship on fiftieth voyage or you are marine scientist on first voyage. Everyone experiences the same, and so, you must first recognize the realities of the situation, however grim. Second, you must make most of opportunities provided. My father understood these things. He escaped Gulag with two other men and led them towards freedom. Like him, let us recognize the realities of this situation. Captain Valdez is not long for this world and is no longer fit for command.”
It was impossible to exert my malnourished mind to argue against that logic. Raymond must have felt similarly, as he let his arm with the canteen drop defeatedly.
“Good,” said Sergo in response. “This is step one. Let us drink to this new understanding of the current circumstance. Imagine the celebration we will have when we survive this!”
Raymond drank a small sip from the canteen before passing it to me. I cradled the round metal canister in my hands before I had a swig. I swished the small amount of water around my mouth, experiencing a brief, but indescribable sense of relief, my tongue no longer feeling like dead wood in my mouth. I drowned the desire to drain the rest and reluctantly handed the container to Sergo. The Russian held the canteen, pondering it for a moment. He then picked up our second canteen, weighing them both in his hands.
After much deliberation, he spoke, saying, “We will give the captain one more day. I will give him my share of the water,” carefully pouring some from the second canteen into Valdez’s mouth. “Let us have some rest and see how he is in the morning. I will take the first watch.”
The one thing it was easy to do aboard the raft was sleep. It was essentially all our feeble, unfed bodies could do. The waves lulled us to sleep when it wasn’t our turn to watch for any passing ships we could alert with the flare gun, which we had never been fortunate enough to use. If it wasn’t our watch, we would typically sleep until late in the morning. But in the early light of dawn on our twenty-third day at sea, I awoke with a start to Sergo shaking me by the shoulders.
“Wake up, doctor!”
“What is it, Sergo? How many times do I have to tell you not to call me-”
“Look,” he whispered, pointing towards the other end of the raft.
I craned my neck over his shoulder.
“Oh my God.”
It was Captain Valdez. He was leaning over the gunwales, if you could call them that, of the raft. He drove his cupped hands into the sea, again and again, bringing them to his mouth and greedily sucking down seawater as fast as he could. In doing so, he woke up Raymond.
“What the fuck?” said Raymond.
The captain turned to look at all of us. He wiped the excess brine from his chin and licked his lips, satisfied. His eyes were wide and bloodshot. He glared at Raymond.
“Don’t be using that kind of language on my ship, lad. Or I’ll have you flogged,” the captain admonished.
“Right. Sorry, sir.”
“Sergo,” the captain nodded at the large Russian man. He turned to me. “And who are you? How did you get aboard this vessel?”
“My name is Matt, sir. We’ve met before. I’m a marine biologist.”
“So a doctor, eh?”
“No, sir. I study multicellular aquatic organisms and zooplankton, as well as their populations. I always wanted to get my doctorate, but the programs–”
“Glad to have a medical professional on board. Right lads,” he said, putting one leg atop the side of the raft and gazing wistfully towards the sea. “I admit, the situation is inauspicious, but it's nothing I can’t handle.”
We all shot glances at one another. Raymond spoke up.
“Sir, do you have any idea where we are? Or what happened to the Valparaiso?”
The captain whirled around angrily. “What are you mouthing off about now, boy? There’s no time for your jabbering!” He grabbed Raymond by the shirt collar and shook him forcefully. “Hoist the sails! Ready about! Helms alee! All men to starboard-” The captain froze and clutched at his chest. He collapsed on the floor of the raft and began convulsing violently, his eyes rolling in his head. His hat had fallen off his head.
“Jesus Christ! Matt, do something!”
“What the hell do you want me to do?!”
Sergo observed the situation calmly. Noticing the cap, he picked it up and put it on his head.
With a final spasm, the captain let out a groan and died.
“Oh, man. This is really bad,” said Raymond.
“No kidding,” I said. “Help me move his body. We’ll give him a burial at sea. It might be what he would have wanted.”
“Do not do this thing,” Sergo interjected.
“What do you mean?”
“Remember what I told you yesterday.”
“Recognize the reality of the situation,” I remembered.
“Yes. And make the most of opportunities provided.”
“The captain is dead, man,” despaired Raymond. “What opportunities could this have possibly provided?”
I pieced it together in my head. “You couldn’t mean…”
“Yes. As you say, there are no fish to be eaten. There is hardly any water to drink. We must not waste. Your mouth is dry, yes? You are starving, are you not?”
The sun reflected off the gold of the officer’s hat he now wore into our eyes. It fit him well.
“The captain is a human being!” I cried out.
“Was a human being,” Sergo corrected. “Now, out here, he is nothing more than meat. Food to fill our hungry bellies.”
Raymond was uncharacteristically silent. My voice was growing hoarse. I tried to calm down. “Sergo. Besides the fact that engaging in cannibalism is morally repugnant, there are real negative physical implications when one consumes human flesh. Not the least of which is the risk of contracting prion diseases, which essentially turn your brain into useless fucking mush.”
Sergo waved me away. “The problem which you describe is very far away. The problems of thirst and hunger are very much immediate. There lies before us many pounds of edible food, pints of drinkable fluid. If you will not partake, fine. I cannot force you. But I cannot guarantee you will survive this predicament, either. Raymond, prepare the stove.”
“Raymond,” I pleaded, “don’t do this.”
Raymond looked down at his abdomen, the ribs of his skeleton poking through his taut skin. “I’m sorry, Matt. But I’m just so hungry…”
Disgusted, I told them I would have no part of it. That it was inhuman. I turned away from them and shut my eyes. But I could not stop from hearing as Sergo cut into the body with the survival knife. I could not stop from smelling as Raymond fried up pieces of our former captain. I could not stop the rumbling in my gut and the drool pooling in my mouth.
The next time I opened my eyes, I could tell that some time had passed. I had become so weak from hunger and thirst that I could no longer move my body. My tongue had become so swollen from dehydration that I could no longer speak. Shifting my eyes around was a herculean task in and of itself. I saw first the mutilated corpse of Captain Valdez, with sizable chunks missing. I then saw Raymond lying flat on the bottom of the raft. He didn’t appear to be breathing. Lastly, I saw Sergo, who was leaning against the side of the raft, peering deeply at the calm sea. He’d taken to wearing the captain’s coat as well as his cap. It was a while before he noticed my eyes were open.
“Ah, doctor. So you are finally awake. You have been asleep for a few days now. Do not worry, I’ve been taking good care of you. Can you speak?”
A pause.
“No? This is okay. I will speak for the both of us, and you will listen. Now, I can admit a few things to you. You may have noticed that I was in better spirits than you and Raymond several days ago. This is because I had been drinking more water than you. I consumed one of our two canteens by myself and refilled it in the sea. The water I so kindly gave to Valdez? This was saltwater. It may have been responsible for his outburst and early death. But we could not have survived this long without his body. Secondly, I must admit that I strangled Raymond to death last night. Resources split far better two ways than three. You must be realistic about the situation.”
He must have seen the look in my eyes.
“Do not worry, doctor. I like you. You do not call me ‘stupid Ruski.’ You refuse to consume our former crewmates. In a way I respect you for this. But I would also like to see you survive. I realize, doctor, I never finished story. My father did escape Gulag with two other men. This part is true. But all three did not live to see freedom. One of these, a fat Polish commissar, called Wojtek or something like this, had been specially chosen by my father. He knew that Siberian wilderness offered little in terms of food and that three hungry mouths would likely prove too many. Besides, he was slowing them down. A week after the three made their escape, my father killed and ate this Wojtek. He told me that if he had not, he never would have lived to see freedom. And I believe him. Which is why I have been feeding you scraps of our comrades' flesh these last few days while you were asleep.”
I tried to scream, but no sound would come out.
“One day, when your feet are once again planted on solid ground, you will forgive me.”
Sergo looked over my shoulder, his eyes suddenly filled with delight. He scrounged about the life raft and retrieved the flare gun, firing a shell into the air.
“The day of our rescue has approached faster than I had anticipated. I trust you will remain silent about the particulars of and those responsible for our recent dietary necessities. After all, it is eat or be eaten, eh, Matthew?”
The officer’s cap looked better on Sergo than it ever had on the captain.
Christian Palmisano is an undergraduate senior at Virginia Wesleyan University studying history. He aspires to that most noble and ethical of callings - lawyer - and plans to attend law school in the near future. Christian is involved with several student organizations on campus, including Phi Alpha Theta, the Pre-Law Society, and the school's Ethics Bowl team. He spends his free time playing the guitar, going to the beach, and browsing Zillow.