2182 Kilohertz Paperback - 2003

Excerpt

Getting into a survival suit was no easy task on flat water. Now it seemed impossible. Seine put a leg in and lost his balance, falling backward against the chart table. He looked up and the Chemist held a hand, reached for a leg. “Here,” he said, and helped Seine’s leg into the wide boot. Then he laughed, a mirthless release out of some primal source. He squinted through lids like some kind of amphibian. He pulled Seine to his feet and yanked the rubber suit, pulling it over Seine’s hips, letting out a little laugh, reaching and pulling the tight hood over Seine’s head. Seine zipped the long front zipper to seal himself into it.

Narvik was still lying on the deck, his unconscious body rolling port to starboard with each wave, the wind howling through the window. “That was one wicked free radical!” the Chemist shouted, nodding in twisted appreciation.
The Chemist reached up and brushed Seine’s face. He wiped away the blood and with that simple gesture Seine felt himself floating in a sea of acquiescence, a languid warmth pervading his muscles, soothing his mind, carrying him off-he knew the feeling, from deep somewhere far off he knew and embraced this moment as an old friend,
a moment of recognition and clarity and self-service. The Chemist seemed to be aware of it too, and for a moment Seine thought the Chemist was really a walking Deadman, a living ghost there to haunt him with the corrupt choice, as if to say, I know you I know you, you let your father die.

In the survival suit, Seine looked like an orange Gumby with nothing but his white face showing. Inside, his scalp itched. Narvik rolled against his legs, stared up blank-faced, blood-wet, shards of glass clinging to his hair, his neck twisted at an impossible angle. Outside the broken window the Gulf roared and hissed, soaring in pitch until somewhere amid all that chaotic sound Seine thought he heard a pattern emerge, a rhythm that blended with highs and lows to become music.

He opened the aft door in slow motion and stepped outside to the wing deck, which sat perched like a penthouse terrace with a view of the abyss. The Chemist was right, he was out of time; he lived out of time, a gone, half-dead, half-made ghost of a human being, wallowing in self-loathing, realizing he had no chance to cut tow, as Fearless took her second knockdown and he flew, ejected by force with a curious feeling through wind and ocean air. He screamed and clawed at the wind, reaching for something-anything-solid.

Then he was overboard and tumbling down the face of a wave. Underwater an instant. Then up-gasping, half air, half water, disoriented, the burning through his chest of salt-water lungs. He felt the tug falling over on top of him; oh, God, it would land on him, crush him, force him down and hold him under. He hit the trough skidding, butt first, the suit buoying his head as he backed up the next wave and saw clearly the tow wire hooked on the quarter bitt just thirty feet from him. The wire lifted up and away from him. The boat let out a metallic creaking sound. The wire chewed the paint from the quarter bitt, bit into the steel, and lifted, and just like that-fast-flipped Fearless on her back. The tall wheelhouse knifed into the wave and disappeared.

The hull bellied up as if exposing herself to the storm, the nakedness striking him even as it sank in a groaning swirl. Seine felt himself cry out, or maybe not; no sound came that he could hear, only the rush of salt water into his body to choke him out and blind him. I’m a free radical now, spinning out of control, flailing through space.

He thought he might die right there, his heart stop dead rather than go forward, but then he was past that moment almost without knowing it. For some reason he thought about Irons and how his frostbitten nose must have looked before some surgeon carved off the black part. It made Seine cover his face with his Gumby hands to keep from freezing his own nose off.

But the crest made covering his face impossible. Despite the impressive buoyancy of the suit-maybe because of it-the violence of the windblown crest tossed him. He flailed his arms to stay righted. Wind and spume tore into his face like a scattershot of pea gravel, and he tumbled.

The wind tossed his legs and he spun on his butt, head down, feet hauling over his head as the wave fell out from under him. He hit the trough with eyes open, belly down, water burning into his eyeballs as if somebody had opened up a pressure nozzle into his face. The spray burned through his skull. He choked on salt water like a balled sock stuffed down his throat. He coughed an explosion. Felt himself foaming at the ears, and with that came deafness and the sound of his own blood. He managed half a breath. He fought panic with an image of a woman, the photograph on the glass, doing duty. Julia-her name was Julia.

The wave crests were physically precarious, but the wave troughs plunged him into the psychological pit. In his mind, that’s what he called it. “Here comes the pit,” he would say to himself, and cover his face and descend, swallowed by a swollen sea. He climbed and dropped and sensed a thousand feet of black ocean eating him from below, and the adrenaline surged.

He closed his eyes and drew inward to combat the torment, to meditate. But closed eyes accentuated the sinking feeling. The pit seemed ten miles deep, twenty miles, stretching down and down, his body falling until he realized his falling was actually rising, a sensation of flying too fast as his inner ear struggled to keep up with the reality of his body’s movement. He had to see. He had to look or he would die, he thought. He opened his eyes and faced downwind, the spray and scattershot of spume blowing away from him and then an instant of hovering. He saw a reach of sky, a distant light gray, a flare of moonlight. He wished for running lights, prayed for warm deck lights making toward him. But he saw nothing but the veined distant shimmer of ocean surrounded by nothing but close clouds and blackness.

And then he was down again. In the pit he heard her voice, the storm sea shouting in Heather’s voice, embittered and lonely, deriding him for his stupidity. He pushed her away and let his mind fall to this woman called Julia. Her picture came to him. A literal black-and-white snapshot now flapping in black current a mile down. The woman
in the photo would be working now. He saw her in the glossy two-dimensionality of the snapshot. A walking photograph, flat, unreal. She would move to the sideband, spin the tuner to 2182 kHz, and depress the mike button. “Ship down,” she would report. “Ship down.”

She soothed him and carried him outside himself. He imagined her motions and tried transmitting them as if by some cosmic radio. The survival suit floated him butt down, legs up, so that he fell into a surfing rhythm of cascading and turning and backing and turning and cascading. He counted troughs and descended and rose and said, inside himself, “Three thousand one hundred and ten” before he saw a blast of light on top of him. At first he thought he’d been found by a UFO until he heard the loudhailer and saw the Coast Guardsmen in float suits lining the cutter deck, and even then he wasn’t sure if he had made it alive, even as they hauled him on board, voices telling him he was the lucky one, that he had Vigilant to thank, the cook-deckhand off Vigilant.


From the Hardcover edition.

Media reviews

“2182 kHz manages the considerable trick of summoning the ghosts of Conrad and Heller and doing them both proud. Raunchily funny and deadly serious, David Masiel charts the profound and the ludicrous and reveals them to be neighboring territories.” -Scott Phillips, author of The Ice Harvest

“I’m a devoted reader of boat sagas, sea adventures, and accounts of solo sailings and sinkings and feats of solo crossing. 2182 kHz is in the tradition of the greatest of them: laconic, gripping, thoughtful, and tough. A wonderful book.”
-Diane Johnson, author of Le Mariage and Le Divorce


“This is a novel about real people in a world as hostile and unforgiving as one of Jupiter’s moons. The book is filled with startling and fascinating detail about oceangoing tugs and their crews who work the frozen, at times almost hallucinogenic, arctic seas. The crews are real people-as strange, complex, anti-social and obsessed as you’d expect in such a place, yet not one of them is, finally, unlikable. Even the sons-of-bitches have heart and courage. This is one hell of a story, each sentence skillfully crafted with love for this harsh world and the respect to tell it right. I loved this book.”
-Kent Anderson, author of Sympathy for the Devil and Night Dogs


From the Hardcover edition.